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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. # 



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'UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.* 



THE 



MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON, 
1 C^^ C 



AND 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF: 



Ctoo Germans 



By REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 



WITH SOME MEMORIALS OF HIS LIFE. 




NEW YORK: 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY, 
770, Broadway. 

1869. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND COMPANY, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. 



CAMBRIDGE : 
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



PHE two sermons here given represent the 
quality of the preaching of the late Rev. 
William James. Rev. Henry Neill, for a 
long time his intimate friend, was requested to 
furnish his recollections of Mr. James, which 
he has done in the Letter herewith published. 
Rev. W. B. Sprague has also consented to the 
republication here, of the narrative portions of 
his funeral discourse. Besides these, the pres- 
ent volume contains two Letters ; one of which 
gives an extended statement respecting his faith 
and hope, written in the prospect of approaching 
death. 

The volume is published for the sake of his 
friends, and in the hope also that a wider circle 
may find in it strength for the spiritual life. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Prefatory Note 7 

Outline of Mr. James's Life. By Rev. Wm, B. 

Sprague 9 

View of Mr. James's Character and Life. By 

Rev. Henry Neill 17 

Letters 61 

Sermons : 

I. The Marriage of the King's Son .... 89 
II. The Guilt of Unbelief 113 



OUTLINE 



OF 



MR. J A M E S'S LIFE. 



OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 

From the Discourse delivered at his Funeral, 
By REV. WM. B. SPRAGUE. 



T T 7ILLIAM JAMES, a son of William and Eliza- 
* * beth (Tighlman) James, was born in this city, 
on the ist of June, 1797. His father had emigrated 
from Ireland to this country in 1793? an d was for many 
years among our most wealthy and influential citizens. 
William spent his earliest years at home, and, during 
part of the time, enjoyed the instruction of that justly 
celebrated scholar and teacher, formerly pastor of the 
First Presbyterian Church, the Rev. John McDonald. 
At the age of fourteen, he was admitted a member of 
Dr. Banks's Academy at Florida ; where he completed 
his course preparatory to entering College. In 18 13, 
he joined the Sophomore class of Princeton College, 
and in 181 6 was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of 
Arts ; having for his classmates Governor McDowell, 
of Virginia, Bishop Mcllvaine, of Ohio, Dr. McLean, 
the late President of the College, and several others 
of distinguished name. He had had religious impres- 
sions, at different periods, from early childhood, but 
it was not till the memorable revival of 1815 in the 



IO OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 

College of which he was a member, that he allowed 
himself to hope that he had become the subject of a 
spiritual renovation, and, as a consequence, made a 
public profession of his faith. He joined the Theo- 
logical Seminary at Princeton in 1816, shortly after 
his graduation ; and, having completed his course 
there, and spent a short time in prosecuting his studies 
elsewhere, he was licensed to preach by the Pres- 
bytery of Albany in September, 1820. His health 
being, at this time, considerably impaired, he crossed 
the ocean almost immediately after his licensure, and 
passed about twenty months, chiefly in Scotland, divid- 
ing his time between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Dur- 
ing this period he lived in comparative retirement, 
conversing more with books than with men ; and 
though within a few minutes' walk of some of the 
greatest spirits of the age, he seems to have studiously 
avoided even an introduction to them. 

Shortly after his return to this country, he com- 
menced preaching in the Murray-street Church, New 
York, where Dr. Mason had previously exercised his 
ministry, and continued thus engaged for six months. 
For a year and a half after this, he preached as a 
stated supply to a congregation formed partly from 
Clarkson and partly from Brockport, in the western 
part of this State, and then removed to Rochester, and 
became the pastor of the Second Church there, in 
which relation he continued for six years. In Janu- 
ary, 1 83 1, he resigned this charge and came to Sche- 



OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. II 

nectady, where he occupied the pulpit of the First 
Presbyterian Church, much to the satisfaction of the 
congregation, till July, 1832. He left this position by 
reason of the failure of his health ; and, after a few 
months, returned to this his native place, and, in the 
fall of 1833, accepted a call to become the pastor of 
our Third Church. Here he remained till February, 
1835, when he resigned the last charge he ever held, 
though he continued to have his home in the midst 
of us till the close of life. During the twenty-three 
years that have passed since that time, he has devoted 
himself much to philosophical and theological re- 
search, though I am not aware that any of the results 
of these labors have been given to the world ; and 
whenever he has consented to occupy the pulpits of 
any of his brethren, here or elsewhere, I believe he 
has been uniformly listened to, not only with fixed at- 
tention, but with marked admiration. Of his last ill- 
ness I need not speak : you all know the alternate 
hope and anxiety that have been expressed con- 
cerning him on every side, and how his malady has 
resisted all medical skill, until it has finally had its 
issue in his being brought hither on his way to the 
grave. 

I trust it will not be thought an infringement of the 
proprieties of the hour, that I here state briefly some 
of my own personal recollections and impressions con- 
cerning our departed friend, that have been accumulat- 
ing during a familiar acquaintance of upwards of half 



12 OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 

a century. Our first meeting was when we both 
joined the Theological Seminary at Princeton in the 
fall of 1816. During the first month or two after we 
became thus associated, I had scarcely any knowledge 
of him except from meeting him in the class ; but even 
then and there he developed traits of character that 
seemed to foreshadow the man of mark. Our ac- 
quaintance, however, after it commenced, soon became 
intimate ; and one of the first revelations he made to 
me was, that he was doubtful and dissatisfied in respect 
to his own spiritual condition. I knew of his going to 
unburden his spirit to our venerable professor, Dr. 
Alexander, whose familiar acquaintance with all the 
various phases of Christian experience rendered him a 
most competent counsellor. I do not think that this 
season of darkness was of very long continuance, 
though I believe his religious exercises often took on a 
morbid cast, and always received a tinge, in a greater 
or less degree, from his peculiar, I might almost say 
unique, intellectual and moral constitution. His ca- 
reer in the Seminary left no one who witnessed it in 
doubt that he possessed talents of a very high order, 
especially the talent for writing and public speaking ; 
and, if my memory is not at fault, the very finest speci- 
mens of pulpit oratory that ever I heard from him, were 
before he had yet entered a pulpit. Shortly after I 
was settled in the ministry, he came to visit me at my 
new home ; and we passed a few days delightfully 
together ; and he, being in an uncommonly genial and 



OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 1 3 

vivacious mood, became an attraction to all whom he 
met. He occupied my pulpit also, and thrilled the 
audience by two very able and eloquent discourses. 
Not long after my removal to this city, he became a 
pastor here by the side of me, and I accounted it a 
privilege that I was permitted to assist in introducing 
him to his new charge. During his ministry here and 
ever since, the same fraternal relations between us that 
commenced at Princeton have been preserved. He has 
often accommodated me, and gratified my congrega- 
tion, by occupying my pulpit when I have been absent ; 
and though, when I have asked this favor of him, he 
has several times given me a negative answer, yet, I 
believe in nearly every instance, reflection has brought 
his kindly spirit into such vigorous exercise as to sug- 
gest to him some way in which the obstacles to a com- 
pliance with my request could be surmounted. I have 
seen him in every stage of his last illness, from the 
time that his daily labors were only occasionally inter- 
rupted by suffering, until he had fallen into that iron 
sleep that was ominous of immediate death ; and what 
has impressed me, during the whole, more than any 
thing else, has been the perfect naturalness of his whole 
demeanor : in the aged suffering minister whom I 
saw before me, I could recognize every characteristic 
of my friend and classmate of 181 6. I always found 
him cheerful, and retaining a deep interest in the past, 
while yet it was manifest that his thoughts were much 
upon the invisible and eternal. In one of our last 



H 



OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 



interviews he expressed to me, in the strongest terms 
possible, the sense of his own unworthiness, but added 
that, in God's revealed truth, he found all the needed 
comfort and hope. I was at his bedside after he had 
ceased to be conscious, and while the current of life 
Was fast ebbing away ; but I could not doubt that the 
sad demonstrations on which my eye rested, were only 
the preparation for the ascent of a ransomed spirit to 
its glorious, eternal home. 

In what I have said of the life of our honored friend, 
I have supplied the material from which may be formed 
at least a general estimate of his character ; but you 
will allow me, notwithstanding, to add a few words, 
illustrative of some of its more striking features. His 
mind was generally teeming with profound thought, 
and was never in its element while moving in a beaten 
track. His taste in composition was so remarkably 
exact as to set at defiance the sternest criticism. His 
discourses for the pulpit were generally elaborated 
with the utmost care, and it must be acknowledged 
were better fitted to furnish material for thought to 
thoroughly disciplined minds, than to minister to the 
gratification of the superficial and emotional hearer ; 
though I have scarcely known any preacher who was 
more generally acceptable to all classes than he. His 
manner was a striking compound of earnestness and 
energy, that left no one in doubt that his utterances 
were from his inmost heart ; and I have sometimes 
heard him, especially in his earlier days, when he rose 



OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 15 

to a pitch of enthusiasm that might have been likened 
to the rushing tempest. He had a large and generous 
heart, that responded readily to the claims of want 
and woe, not only in Christian sympathy, but in liberal 
contributions. He was naturally impulsive, and some- 
times "the sober second thought" changed his judg- 
ment and his purpose altogether ; for he was too 
magnanimous to hold to an error for the sake of being 
consistent. He doubtless judged correctly in retiring 
from the regular duties of the ministry in his latter 
years ; for, while he had great power in the pulpit, 
which he never ceased to exercise occasionally as long 
as his health would permit, he was fully aware that his 
peculiarities of temperament were not in harmony with 
the uniform routine of pastoral life. His high intelli- 
gence and genial spirit came out in his private inter- 
course, and he has left behind him many a friend who 
will hold these attractive qualities in grateful and en- 
during remembrance. I cannot forbear to mention, in 
this connection, a circumstance, strikingly illustrative 
of his character, that has been communicated to me 
since his death. A gentleman, now occupying one of 
the highest military positions in the land, informed me 
that, while Mr. James was a pastor at Rochester, he 
was himself brought to a deep sense of his sinfulness, 
and, through the kindness of some friend, was intro- 
duced to Mr. James as a counsellor. Instead of mak- 
ing particular inquiries concerning the state of his 
mind, as would have seemed natural, he looked at him 



1 6 OUTLINE OF MR. JAMES'S LIFE. 

for a few moments in silence, and then opened the 
Bible, and bade him read and study the first chapter of 
the second Epistle of Peter, and endeavor to bring his 
heart and life into unison with its teachings and spirit ; 
after which he offered a deeply solemn and fervent 
prayer in his behalf, and then allowed him to retire. 
That interview resulted in the conversion of one whose 
whole subsequent life has furnished the proof that there 
is a power in religion to withstand the temptations in- 
cident to the exercise of the highest military authority. 
I mention this, not so much as a gratifying instance of 
the good effect of his ministry, as an illustration of the 
peculiar manner in which he exercised it. It is safe 
to say that his noble qualities of mind and heart have 
impressed themselves deeply on his contemporaries ; 
while the peculiarity, I may say the originality, of his 
entire character will help to keep the impression more 
vivid, and to render it more enduring. 



VIEW OF MR. JAMES'S CHARACTER 
AND LIFE: 

IN A LETTER COMMUNICATED, 
By REV. HENRY NEILL. 



My dear Sir : 

T HAVE received your request ; but we have all felt 
-*■ that a peculiar and formidable obstacle presents 
itself in every attempt to give a definite outline to the 
character or gifts of Mr. James. 

I refer to that breadth and universality which con- 
stituted his identity ; and which caused a conductor 
of the public press in Albany to write, " We know 
of no pen or voice capable of rendering his qualities 
adequate justice. " 

Many persons of no ordinary intellect have said, 
that, when in his presence, they were always affected 
with a sense of awe at the magnitude and variety of 
his inherited force and faculty, at his instinctive dis- 
cernments, and the scope of his carefully gained 
acquisitions. 

And yet who that saw him often, had any doubt 
that he held himself singularly indifferent to every 
form of natural bestowment, and of external advan- 



1 8 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

tage (in which also he largely shared), by reason of a 
master passion of surpassing beauty and power con- 
stantly working in him, even a never-ceasing desire to 
be in harmony with the Divine mind, in spirit, and in 
movement? He panted after God, and assimilation 
to Him in impulse and in action, as the hart panteth 
after the water-brooks. " I want holiness so much," 
he writes, in a letter dated December, 1856, u that I 
might say I want nothing else. One additional grain 
of holiness or conformity to God, with a consciousness 
that God was pleased with it, would outweigh a uni- 
verse of every other kind of good." This statement 
contains the key-note of his life. The desire expressed 
in it, animated him at Princeton ; led him to Dr. Gor- 
don rather than to Chalmers, at Edinburgh ; ab- 
sorbed him at New York on his return from Scot- 
land, when preaching to crowded assemblies from the 
pulpit made vacant by the death of Dr. John Mason ; 
gave direction to his thoughts at Rochester, so much 
so that he was known as " the minister who desired 
to be sanctified ; " and, since then, has been ever re- 
vealing itself, in letters ; in the selection of friends ; 
in the choice of books ; in themes for sermons ; in 
essays ; in conversation ; in journeyings (for he never 
hesitated to travel a hundred miles to visit one whose 
doubts or fears he could not allay by his pen) ; in the 
language and tone of his devotions, never to be for- 
gotten by any who ever heard his words in prayer ; 
until desire merged itself into a knowledge and enjoy- 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 



19 



ment of God, seldom granted in this world to the 
fallen sons of men. The unrest that at times appeared 
in him grew out of a sorrow often expressed and pain- 
fully active, that he was not, to his own consciousness, 
perfectly "conformed to the image" of God's dear Son. 

Greatly did many of his friends admire the type of 
his piety, in its deep undertone, as well as in its 
strains of faith and hope and victory. But I shall not 
attempt to describe its nature, or its sources, or its 
growth (although he has revealed these in his letters), 
any more than to measure the faculties through which 
it flowed. 

The most that I shall now venture to give utterance 
to, in relation to Mr. James, and that not without mis- 
giving, is an impression, which fastened itself upon 
me as soon as I knew him ; which grew more distinct 
during fifteen years of unreserved intercourse ; and 
which lost nothing of its depth or tenacity, as sick- 
ness and extreme torture, and a conscious approach to 
the solemnities of eternity, did their dissolving and 
sanctifying work. 

Whatever might be the theme of his conversation, or 
the character of the labor he was devising or executing, 
I felt that I was in the presence of one, in whom, al- 
though " subject to like passions as we," the desire to 
be " at one with God," not only regulated powers of 
vast compass, and sensibilities charged with vitality, 
but organized and gave unity to the movement of a 
nature of immense volume ; so that it was compelled 



20 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

to be constantly useful, on a scale commensurate with 
its capacity ; and yet so constrained by its own ideals 
to depreciate itself, that it did the grand work it was 
called to, with seldom an apprehension that it was 
doing any thing. 

It was a splendid sight to see him from 1852 to 
1856, as I did, every summer at Lenox, with his 
vigorous intellect, his wealth of feeling, his firmly knit 
frame, his eye that expanded and kindled so imme- 
diately as ideal themes were introduced ; but it was 
sublime to know him from 1862 to 1868, after his 
theology was adjusted ; after doubts had ceased to 
make their appearance ; after nature had yielded to 
the spirit ; when every material symbol, and every 
human relationship, constantly reminded him of its 
counterpart in spiritual bonds or Christian joys ; when 
he began to view the things of time from very much 
the same stand-point that it is supposed redeemed men 
look at them after they have left the body ; when his 
union with or absorption in God seemed to gain rapid 
increase from month to month ; and when, without 
losing a particle of his manly charity and prodigal 
generosity and intellectual intrepidity, he seemed ready 
at any moment (save for that never-satisfied and aching 
thirst for greater conformity to the Divine mind) to 
enter upon the employments and enjoyments of im- 
mortality. 

His theory of the way to grow in spiritual attain- 
ments wrought so effectually in him that, what was 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 21 

desire in his earlier life, and in his mature manhood, 
seemed to be in fulfilment or fruition as he ripened in 
years, and reconciled his philosophy with the words 
and promises of Scripture. 

Hence, I have felt, that, if he does most for his race 
who reveals to his fellow-mortals most of the true God, 
and in such a way that they shall receive and rejoice 
in the knowledge conferred, Mr. James must ever 
stand high among the benefactors of his generation. 
The knowledge which he imparted so earnestly, elo- 
quently, and unremittingly from his pen and voice, and 
from the purchase and distribution in uncounted num- 
bers of any books which might further his purpose, he 
gained at a great cost, and by the exercise of powers 
of a high philosophic order. 

Having for many years accustomed himself to con- 
struct his theological system, and to gain his concep- 
tions of Jehovah mainly from the justice of God as 
reflected in the conscience, it was an era of great de- 
light and of vastly augmented capacity to confer bless- 
ings upon others, when he reconstructed that system 
so as to make love, God's central attribute, and human 
affections and intimate human relationships the organs 
and types through which that marvellous love was 
recognized and reflected. At the same time he relin- 
quished naught of his reverence and awe for the holi- 
ness of Jehovah. 

Hence a knowledge of man, as to his nature and sus- 
ceptibilities, was a study of profound interest with him. 



22 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

" Without some anthropology, or true philosophy of 
man," he says in a letter of March 4, 1862, " it is im- 
possible to construct a treatise of sanctification. Up- 
ham's, as I think, being unsound ; and knowing of no 
other which has ever been applied to this subject with 
fearless logic (unless it is Emmon's, which is far 
worse), I have been compelled to wait until a scheme 
has formed itself in my own mind. The ground prin- 
ciple of it came to me as early as 1846. I felt that 
without allowing much more for man's original, natu- 
ral similitude to God, than was allowed in the common 
notions of people and books, no doctrine of sanctifica- 
tion, however scriptural and sacred it might appear, 
could be made distinct in theory, or efficient in prac- 
tice. . . . The social and religious instincts in man, 
which appear simultaneously with the dawn of self- 
consciousness, and for a time take distinct courses, 
are tending continually by the laws of Providence to 
merge into unity; and as thus identified, — that is, as 
far as they are, — they become the true life of humanity. 
Sanctification is the identification of the social and 
the religious instincts ; the religious being the culmina- 
tion of the social. This is the thought which has been 
working in the upper or philosophical chamber of my 
soul since 1846 ; whilst the fires of purgatory have 
been working destruction to every mundane interest in 
the heart beneath. This is the philosophic principle. 
Parallel with this runs the scriptural principle, that 
Christ is the true bridegroom of the soul." 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 23 

The practical working, and not a little of the nature 
of the theory of holier living, which interested Mr. 
James at this time, is very impressively put forth in a 
letter, to an inquiring friend, on the benefit of trials. 
In this he writes, — 

" From your talking of falling back on ' the Evi- 
dences,' as well as from some other indications, I could 
not but have a misgiving that you were finding almost 
as much difficulty as ever with the i contents ' of Reve- 
lation. 

" Perfectly persuaded as I am, not only of the genu- 
ineness of your faith in those contents, but that I thor- 
oughly understood also the most interior causes of its 
weakness, nothing restrained me from writing long 
ago but the impossibility of compressing my solution 
of your difficulties within any reasonable bounds, 
which indeed is no tax upon me ; for of all earthly 
occupations, there is none which gives me such pleas- 
ure as the endeavor to strengthen the weak ; but I have 
feared you might think it was a tax. 

" To relieve you, then, as much as possible of all such 
feelings, let me first say, that an occasional letter, of 
the kind I am about to write to you, is not only neces- 
sary as satisfying the longings of friendship, but noth- 
ing else is so important to keep up my spirit in the 
work with which I am at present mainly occupied. 

" I proceed, therefore, at once circumferentially as 
usual, rather than diametrically ; first, to take an ob- 
servation for the purpose of determining exactly where 



24 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

you are in your course heavenward, and then, to solve 
some of the doubts and perplexities by which your 
aspirations are checked and your progress impeded." 

Then follow twenty pages minutely noticing the dif- 
ficulties in the way of faith and assurance. 

Toward the close he adds, — 

" I have said that the spring of the Divine life in the 
soul is a desire toward God, based originally upon a 
sense of His perfection, but called into immediate and 
lively action by the expression of His peculiar affection 
for us. 

" The measure of our inward life will always cor- 
respond to the degree in which we are sensible of His 
favor ; a sense of this, such as we never had before, 
though it may still be comparatively faint, always 
marks the era of our conversion. 

" It is an intimation, or what is so considered, of 
God's love to us, which first awakens the sentiment 
of love to Him. It is then, that in Him whom we 
have hitherto regarded only as our judge, we begin to 
recognize the love of a Father, and in this love we find 
for a time our supreme felicity. Of course how to 
retain this love, how to entitle ourselves to a fuller 
expression of it, how this new-born happiness may be 
enlarged and perpetuated, becomes the object of our 
chief solicitude. 

"We feel that nothing can assure us of this but a 
life of holiness, meaning by this a life in which the 
love of God is perpetually triumphant over the love of 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 25 

the world. But we too often find, that, whilst con- 
science is strongly on the side of God, not without a 
better feeling arising from a sense of His kindness and 
generosity ; and whilst the w T ill under this twofold 
pressure is making a constant and often a most earnest 
effort to be faithful, — some of our liveliest affections 
(hope and desire) are still so much in the interest of 
the world, that little or nothing comes of all our en- 
deavors. We make no advance ; we often question 
whether the heart's union with God, which we hoped 
would soon be perfect, is even begun. We become 
despondent of our ability ever to attain a life of holi- 
ness. 

" If we do not yield wholly to the tempter, we wage 
but a feeble conflict ; our prayers, which ought to be 
full of confidence, being chiefly confessions of shame 
and deprecations of the Divine judgment. Often 
should I have perished by the secret abandonment of 
my hope, but for one principle which has always 
saved me from such a catastrophe even at the lowest 
ebb of my affairs, and which now revealed, in the 
strongest light and in its full meaning, by the horrid 
darkness, which was ever thickening around me, at 
last brought me a complete and final deliverance. 

u It was simply the principle of justification by faith 
alone, which means, when fully understood, that God's 
love is always wholly irrespective of our character, or 
of our love to Him. You will readily see, that the ten- 
dency of the principle, seemingly so clear and certain, 



26 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

that continuance in the love of God could only be 
assured by a life of holiness, connected with utter 
failure to attain such a life, would be to remit one 
again from grace to justice, from the blessed refuge 
which had been found in a father's bosom, to the 
prison-house of the law. 

" But there was this difference between my prison- 
house experiences before and after any true acquaint- 
ance with the gospel. In the former state, I knew no 
way of getting out. I was a prisoner for life and for 
ever. In the latter, my faith in the doctrine always 
let me out, when matters came to the worst. But 
still I was let out rather as a reprieved criminal, sub- 
ject to be remanded again by my shortcomings, and 
very certain to be so remanded ; for how to avoid these 
shortcomings and their direful retribution, I knew not. 
I had continual desire, and continual disappointment. 
Now, to such I aver, that the very good which we 
lose and are ever losing in created things may be 
found for ever in God. 

" I cannot conceive, that any dread of a hereafter, 
with the proffer of a release from its terrors, or the 
considerations which are addressed to conscience 
merely, powerful as those considerations are to 
awaken attention, are ever sufficient to conquer the 
love of the world. Nor can I conceive that any sense 
of the Divine authority and perfection, unaccompanied 
by a special tender of His love to us and a promise of 
the most intimate and endearing personal fellow- 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 2 J 

ship, could do it. The love of God which repels all 
rival affections, springs not primarily from a sense of 
His perfection, however that may command our 
esteem and reverence, but from a belief or sense of 
His infinite affection. 

" This was what the gospel tendered me ; and for this 
I forsook as well as I could, as far as a feeble faith 
could carry me, the pleasures of the world. But how 
has this promise been verified ? How is it consistent 
with this grievous experience? Consistent with it I 
In the light which I have long since acquired, these 
trials have become the crowning proof of it. For 
many years I have been in the habit of returning 
as heartfelt thanks for the discipline of God's provi- 
dence, as for the love of His promises ; so plain it is, 
that I have been saved by the combination. 

" I have long since learned that continuance in the 
love of God is not assured by a life of holiness, and 
never was intended to be. It is assured by the work 
of Christ for us, and trusting in that work, or resting 
upon it, one may be just as certain of his interest in 
His love, as if he were already in glory ; ' for whom- 
soever He justifies, them He also glorifies.' But what 
is the meaning of these trials? They are the begin- 
ning of our glorification ; the essential means of it. 
They are the plucking up of the weeds which hinder 
the growth of the good seed. They are the answer to 
our daily prayers, ' lead us not into temptation, but 
deliver us from evil.' So far from being the expres- 



28 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

sion of God's anger on account of remaining sin, they 
express His unchanging purpose to make us holy. 

" He sees us in our folly still cleaving to the world, 
but yet with some sincere desire toward Him. He is 
determined that the desire shall not be disappointed, 
and therefore that the folly shall be utterly purged out ; 
not a particle of it shall remain. It is sometimes a 
very long work, but not necessarily so ; and it is al- 
ways a sure one. 

" Often, as it became manifest that my desire for some 
temporal or spiritual blessing was going to be denied, 
and denied entirely, the shadows of death compassed 
me ; for an absolute denial seemed equivalent to His 
saying that He had no regard for me. He would not 
give me the temporal blessing, nor seemingly any 
thing spiritual to make up for the loss of it. Then 
called I on the name of the Lord : O Lord ! I beseech 
thee deliver my soul. And lo ! what is this change 
that has come over me ? — not in a moment nor in a 
month, but as the result of all this discipline. In the 
utter wreck and ruin of worldly ambition and hope, I 
find a joy, in comparison with which their highest 
realization would have been an empty shadow. 

" To a little child the conduct of the husbandman in 
putting his ploughshare through a field of showy wild 
flowers, leaving in their place nothing but ugly fur- 
rows, would be any thing but pleasing. It would give 
but little relief to see him throwing a small seed into 
the furrows too insignificant to be noticed, and then 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 29 

burying it entirely out of sight, by the rude operation 
of the harrow. And yet, if the husbandman were his 
father, and should tell him, that out of this destruction 
should spring up in a little while a world of far higher 
fertility and beauty, he might be reconciled for that 
' little while ' by faith in the paternal promise. 
Through me the Father tells you that the very thing 
you desire, but glorious as to measure and quality 
beyond any conception of it you can now form, will, 
in a c little while,' be yours. 

" ' Behold I come quickly/ 

" You will find a marvellous strictness of truth in 
all that He says. He means very quickly. His com- 
ing seems slow to us only because we are children. 
Three weeks to a child who is expecting his good 
things, at the Christmas holidays, seems an age. But 
when they have come, your only wonder, when you 
consider their glory, will be, how they could have 
come so soon." 

Nor did Mr. James, as has been intimated, in thus 
magnifying the desirableness and necessity of an abid- 
ing view of God's love, for the establishment and 
growth of any trembling believer, in the Christian life, 
lose sight of holiness as an attribute of the true God, 
and of the indispensableness of an awful sense of it for 
the proper construction and reception of any system of 
religious truth. 

He believed, with Dr. A. A. Hodge, that " holiness 
with God is no more optional than is existence. That 



3° 



REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 



it stands to sin, as immutable hatred and vindicatory 
justice. So thoroughly impressed was he that Jehovah 
was a Being of inherent and absolute justice, that he 
does not hesitate to write, that " the love to his offspring 
in the paternal bosom is not so strong as the love of 
truth and honor and integrity ; and that in case of a 
conflict between them, there is an end of the social 
bond." 

The letter in which this statement appears, contains 
a critique on Maurice, in which Mr. James says : 
u Notwithstanding his show of qualities which, among 
theologians are rare ; his talking always to the heart, 
and yet always through the understanding, but par- 
ticularly by his most ingenious, and in some instances 
successful efforts to harmonize and almost identify the 
dogmas of the church with the demands of our nature ; 
to say nothing of his powers as a wit and thinker, his 
affluent yet simple diction, his masterly ease, the great 
compass of his thoughts, and the fulness of his sym- 
pathy ; I have no doubt he is unsound, according to 
any Orthodox standard. I look upon him as a Chris- 
tian, and surely a most accomplished man ; a man, 
however, of more acumen than piety, like Origen and 
so many other great lights, — of more ambition than 
of faith and love. 

" I think I have a very clear idea of the root of all 
his errors. The end of all his refinement is to vin- 
dicate and magnify the love of God. But he does this 
by virtually denying the Divine holiness, by shutting 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 3 1 

his eyes to the worst effect of sin, and that in which 
the evil nature specially appears ; viz., the wound 
which it inflicts on God's moral sensibilities, which is 
the cause of His wrath against it, a wrath which fills 
the earth with judgments and burns to the lowest hell. 
The whole evil of sin, as Maurice views it, appears in 
its natural (not judicial) effect upon the mind of the 
sinner ; its only effect upon the mind of God is to 
excite His pity. 

" Occasionally, an expression may occur which in- 
timates more, but it is meant evidently to conciliate 
Orthodoxy, and in any deep sense is repudiated by his 
system. I cannot learn from him, that God hates sin 
with a perfect hatred. It grieves him as the trans- 
gression of a child grieves a parent, but it does not 
provoke Him to threaten it in good earnest with ever- 
lasting punishment. On the contrary, the only effect 
of sin upon God, as far as I can learn from Maurice, 
is to bring out in all its intensity His love to man. 
Love, according to Maurice, is comprehensive of 
holiness. They cannot be distinguished. The very 
holiness of God, therefore, obliges Him to save man 
from the effects of sin. That the result of his system 
is a refined universalism, there can be no doubt. In 
his last essay he is forced to confess it. For what else 
can he mean by the paragraph on page 360 ? 

" My grand objection to his system is, that by di- 
vesting sin of its worst aspect, he robs the love of 
God of its highest and its most peculiar manifestation. 



32 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

If I did ,not believe that the holiness of God was some- 
thing which could be distinguished from His love ; 
something, in virtue of which He hated sin, and was 
bent upon its punishment, and with the same intense 
sincerity with which in virtue of the other he pities 
the sinner, and is bent upon his deliverance, it seems 
to me that neither my misery as a subject of wrath, 
nor God's love in giving His Son, nor Christ's agony 
to save me, would have the same effect upon my heart 
and conscience which they have now. You will ob- 
serve that Maurice has no conception of any relation 
between God and man, but that of Father and child. 
Nor do men — whilst they are sinning, and intending 
to sin — look upon God as their Father. 

" But suppose, to give the greater force to our view, 
that God is their Father. Is He nothing but a Father? 
Does not every child know that the parent is also a man ? 
and that, as such, he is governed by other affections 
besides love to his offspring? that behind that love 
which beams in the paternal face, there are other 
qualities calculated to awaken fear? that love to his 
offspring, however strong in the paternal bosom, is not 
strong enough to set aside the love of truth, of honor, 
and of integrity ; and that, in case of a conflict between 
the social bond and the bond of moral principle, the 
love is supplanted by the workings of the moral na- 
ture?" 

With such a view of the Divine perfections ; with 
his singularly active and sensitive conscience, so ready 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 33 

to reflect the justice of Jehovah ; with a mind deeply 
lacerated at any want of conformity to the Law of 
God ; and with a vigorous imagination, always mag- 
nifying his own defects, it is not strange that Mr. 
James held, and with all his might, to the righteousness 
of Christ as the ground of his acceptance with the 
Father ; nor that he should have expressed his belief 
in it, with strong confidence and joy, and taken pains 
to show its connection with those attainments in holi- 
ness after which he aspired. So many are the letters 
which he has written, so varied the utterances which 
he has made, on this point, that it is difficult to select 
from them. 

" I have been convinced from the Scriptures, that, 
just as certainly as it is God's will that we should be 
holy and glorify Him in our lives, it is His will also 
that we first believe in His Son, of which the main, 
and almost the engrossing idea, is — to express it in the 
language of Edwards — that we should ' hide ourselves 
in the ample folds of the robe of His righteousness,' " 
he writes, in 1853 5 anc ^ adds, "The principle which 
gives life to the soul, is, that we are justified by a 
work wrought wholly out of ourselves ; and gradually 
sanctified by trusting it as such, — by holding fast for 
ever that idea. This is the Pauline doctrine. And 
Olshausen's peculiar merit is, that he maintains it with 
more learning and skill and boldness than any other 
equally profound expositor. He has not more learning 
than Tholuck. But he has more genius, and, appar- 

3 



34 REV- WILLIAM JAMES. 

entry, a stronger experience ; although, in this respect, 
Tholuck is not defective. I must say, that Neander on 
John disappoints me. He is a great historian, a won- 
derful philosophizer of history ; but, of the milk of the 
Word, he is rather a diluter." Then he adds, " Let me 
quote from Olshausen on Romans, iv. 3-5 : ' If faith 
turns away from its proper object, the Christ without us, 
and the objective purpose of God in man's redemp- 
tion, and directs itself to the Christ within us, as the 
ground, not the consequence, of redemption ; and if 
the man only considers himself the object of the Divine 
favor, because he discovers Christ in himself, and only 
as long as this is the case, then faith altogether loses 
its proper nature, and the man falls again under the 
Law.' " 

After carefully commenting upon each chapter of 
an elaborate work recently published upon the sacri- 
fice of Christ, Mr. James writes : " Upon my mind 
the fact of an Atonement, in the orthodox sense of a 
satisfaction to Justice, is fixed more firmly than ever." 
" Christ suffered for us in a sense in which the other 
persons of the Trinity did not. But for the really 
vicarious sufferings of the Son restoring our filial rela- 
tions, we should never have had their sympathy at all, 
but only their antagonism. Apart from this, their sym- 
pathy had been wholly with the Law, not with its viola- 
tors. Christ's sufferings were undertaken and endured 
to redeem us from this antagonism, to which the purity 
of the Divine nature, its sense of wrong, its necessary 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 35 

sympathy with the Law, in a word, had otherwise con- 
signed us. His suffering was really vicarious ; theirs, 
anterior to His, only such, at the most, as the judge, 
who is also a man, feels for the prisoner at his bar. 

" The Second Person of the Trinity undertakes to 
save both the Law and its victim, by placing himself 
under the Law as a substitute for the guilty. The 
Father, loving the world, accepted the proffered media- 
tion. He so loved the world, that He gave — spared 
not — His own Son, but gave Him to be a propitiation 
for our sins." Mr. James declares that the root of the 
error of the writer whom he was criticising, lies in 
this, " He conceives of God as though He were nothing 
more than an Infinite man ;" and adds, " With me the 
study of years has been to mediate between love and 
justice, both of them essential elements of the Divine 
Righteousness ; and, seeing a new matter here pro- 
posed, I was tempted to accept it at once, without 
allowing my critical, or even my logical, forces to 
come into action, and so I allowed it for a time to 
run away with me, and thought, until this second 
revision, that I had found the treasure hid in the field. 
But it appears, according to this book, that justice, or 
the principle which necessitates penalty for the viola- 
tion of Law, is not included in God's essential right- 
eousness. It is simply a matter of policy ; and thus 
the absolute ill-desert of sin, a fiction ; and conscience, 
a provisional faculty for giving this fiction temporarily 
the force of a reality." 



36 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

Thus we learn the doctrinal basis of those letters on 
progress in holiness, on the way to get rid of disturb- 
ing doubts, and to triumph over easily besetting sins, 
which Mr. James was always writing to any mind 
whom he thought would receive his counsels, and be 
benefited by his correspondence. It is marvellous 
with what industry, cheerfulness, persistence, and 
fidelity, he gave himself to this work. The labors of 
men on their sermons, and in their parishes, were light 
compared with the epistolary toils he voluntarily im- 
posed upon himself, and with delight carried on year 
after year, through nearly a whole life-time. 

A most interesting and remarkable volume could be 
made from his letters to souls inquiring after peace ; 
and another, from words, addressed to those thirsting 
for a more entire conformity to the Divine Will than 
their vagrant affections had permitted them to reach. 
Each of these would be a model in literature, and a 
cardiphonia in religion. And not less valuable and 
voluminous treatises could be compiled from his criti- 
cisms on authors, especially on those who attempted to 
reconcile the ways of God with reason, equity, and the 
wants of humanity. The explication (as he terms it) 
of John, xiv. 21-23, furnishes a specimen of his epis- 
tolary exegesis. I wish it were possible, within the 
limits intended, to insert, at this place, one of his let- 
ters, in which he gives his views of the position which 
love should hold as compared with justice, in the direc- 
tions to be given to any one suffering, without allevia- 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 37 

tion, under the condemnation of the Law ; and 
another, showing how "Faith is the germ of the new 
man coming to the birth ; which new man, created in 
regeneration, is absolutely pure." 

" Therefore," he adds, as Olshausen says, " salvation 
is not to be considered as depending upon the devel- 
opment of the Christ in us, but only our degree of 
glorification. Therefore may the believer, however 
backward his development, of which he is abundantly 
conscious, look toward death without anxiety for his 
salvation. The Christian has, neither before nor after 
his conversion, to generate an independent sanctifica- 
tion of his own ; but he has only constantly to receive 
the stream of the influential pow r ers of Christ's life 
upon him : just as the tree, when the development of 
its germ is begun, has only to suck in water, air, and 
light, in order to unfold itself from within ; and all the 
drawing of a stupid gardener at the branches, all his 
working at the buds to coax forth blossoms, can only 
disturb, but never further, its development." 

What a treasure, the deep, earnest, prolonged, ten- 
derly appreciating sympathy, and the knowledge 
pressed forth by it in those letters, would be, to those 
desiring to see more of Mr. James, and to know the 
truth as it is in Christ, and in a gifted servant of God 
who struggled so to put Christ on. Nor would they 
be any less so, because he constantly depreciated his 
own attainments. He ever illustrated what Trench 
says : — 



3S REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

" Only when we love, we find 
How far our heart has come behind 
The love we ought to show." 

But there is so much that is personal in these commu- 
nications, such frank statements of his own sorrows 
and defeats (by detailing which, as well as by opening 
up the path and steps of his deliverance, he sought to 
encourage others), that we hesitate to lay their con- 
tents, unabridged, before any human eyes, save those 
for whom the lines were prodigally and accurately 
penned. And yet how can any one obtain a proper 
impression of the man, or of his doctrine, apart from 
a glimpse, at least, of his correspondence? Its first 
sentence reveals the object of the following extract 
from one of his letters : 

" Remember that your greatest difficulty will always 
arise, as it always has arisen, from legality ; not from 
any want of earnestness, but from the idea that a cer- 
tain amount of earnestness is necessary before you can 
feel the embrace of Christ's love, or before, at least, 
you can appropriate His fulness. The whole subject 
has two sides, and it is extremely difficult to put forth 
one as strongly as it ought to be, without seeming to 
contravene the other ; and yet they are perfectly har- 
monious. Let me show you how they became one, in 
my own case. For a long time I was in precisely the 
condition which, in my last letter, I assumed to be 
yours ; conscious of a state in which worldly and 
spiritual affections were perpetually contending, the 



HIS LIFE AXD CHARACTER. 39 

former sustained by deeply rooted and long-matured 
habit, constantly acted on by outward temptations ; the 
latter, by a very little precious experience, and by the 
promise that, with perseverance in prayer, they should 
prevail at last. At any time I would have been most 
willing to terminate the conflict by giving up the 
world, if I knew how to do it, — how to get it out of 
my heart. The things which I would, I did not ; and 
the things which I hated, those I did. I felt myself a 
miserable captive, sold under sin. I saw no way of 
deliverance, but by some Divine manifestation which 
would completely win my affections ; and, for this, I 
was always sighing and praying. But I had the idea, 
also, that this manifestation was in some way condi- 
tional upon some act of my own will, — upon an entire 
self-surrender. How often and long" have I labored 
to do that thing, hoping that the happy hour was not 
distant when I should do it so thoroughly that God 
would withhold Himself no longer, and then I should 
be free ! But that hour never came. I never became 
conscious of surrendering all to God, until some time 
after I had become perfectly assured that God had 
freely given Himself to me. But understand what I 
mean by this. I do not mean until God had revealed 
Himself to me in a personal manner, but until I had 
become practically convinced and settled in the doc- 
trine that the love of God was a fountain for human- 
ity ; free, in all its fulness, to every one who desired 
it ; that nothing at all was required to make it mine ; 



4° 



REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 



that it was mine now, in virtue of what Christ had 
done for me, — to which nothing could be added by 
any self-surrender, or any act of mine whatever. 
This was the doctrine which, as I have told you, 
brought me out of my first bondage ; and every step 
which I have taken since toward a higher freedom, 
has been impelled by a fresh sense of it coming to me, 
for the most part, not when most conscious of fidelity 
to Him, but when most conscious of incurable faith- 
lessness. The utter failure of all my own efforts to do 
any thing for my own cure, and the repeated experi- 
ence of God's forgiving mercy and tender interest in 
me notwithstanding, have, at length, broken the power 
of legality entirely. I see plainly that I shall be saved 
in spite of myself. I no longer try to prepare myself 
for a Divine blessing or manifestation, by any acts of 
self-denying devotion, because I feel that God's free 
loving-kindness makes them entirely unnecessary. But 
what is the effect of this view of the freeness of salva- 
tion? It compels me to do, as a matter of delight, 
what I never could do as a matter of duty. I surren- 
der all to God, as naturally as I breathe ; not as a 
condition of receiving something from Him, for in 
Christ and with Christ I am now persuaded He has 
given me every thing ; and, among other things, I sur- 
render, also, this long desire for a personal manifesta- 
tion, which I perceive has been selfish in its spring. I 
want such a manifestation, indeed, but I want it now 
entirely for His sake ; because it will enable me to 



BIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 4 1 

serve Him better. In this view I labor for it con- 
stantly ; perfectly submissive, however, while it is 
withheld ; rejoicing to serve Him by contending with 
obstructions : always assured of His love, not on the 
ground of any personal communication, but of His 
general word to humanity, of which experience has 
made me a believer. It is just in this way that you 
will receive all that you are expecting : by giving God 
glory for what you have received in common with the 
race ; by getting into the habit of assuming that what 
you are seeking, viz., God's love, in all its fulness, is 
already yours. Sin and the world are already con- 
quered as far as that persuasion is rooted in you ; what 
remains of their power shall be entirely destroyed, by 
your holding it fast in all trials. This is the only act 
of will to which I would now encourage you. In a 
little while God's glory will be a constant, loving man- 
ifestation." 

Perhaps I might insert a portion of another, written 
to one importunately desiring some personal manifes- 
tation of Christ to the soul, — 

. . . " What makes our life a bondage is, that 
the element of faith in the Saviour which is mixed 
with it, is so little. It saddens us chiefly to think what 
a dishonor such a life is to the Divine goodness, to 
the provisions of the gospel, to the self-sacrificing 
love and condescension and faithfulness of the Good 
Shepherd. Why should we be so anxious and un- 
settled and distrustful and joyless when such a Friend 



42 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

has died for us, lives for us, and is ever, if there is 
any truth in the gospel, engaged to give efficacy to 
our prayers, and reality to our hopes ? How can we 
be so heartless, when wooed by such importunity of 
self-devoting love ? It is found in experience, that a 
little ingenuous confidence is not enough to break our 
bondage ; but a little added to that, and a little more 
to that, will at last do it. Suppose Christ should 
reveal Himself personally to you, and should say to 
you, ' My little one ' (the name, you know, which He 
gives to the least and weakest of His people), ' My lit- 
tle one, so unlovely and unworthy in your own eye, you 
are most precious in mine. I love you with a love 
which has no dependence upon your character, but 
rather has been excited by your utter helplessness, your 
poverty, your meanness, your weakness, your troubles 
and dangers, your bondage and misery, of which you 
are so sensible : these are your recommendations ; 
these are your claims upon my sympathy ; these are 
the bonds by which you will for ever hold me. Hence- 
forth you have nothing to do but to give me your con- 
fidence. And that I ask, not because any deficiency 
in it will turn my heart away from you, but only for 
your own sake. I want " your joy to be full." My 
love is free and pure and disinterested. It cannot be 
changed, but only be made more resolute, by your 
infirmities and dangers ; though, to your own con- 
sciousness, — until your faith is recovered, — it must, 
of course, always appear otherwise. But your salva- 



E1S LIFE AND CHARACTER. 



43 



tion cannot fail. My honor is engaged for it. 1 have 
betrothed you to myself for ever, and there is nothing 
which my love can do for you, for which you may not 
at once command it. Begin the trial of it immediately, 
cast all your care upon me, and, when the enemy ap- 
pears, let it be a powerful worldly affection, a strong 
inducement to rest in the creature, instead of going on 
to seek your rest and happiness in me ; or, let it be a 
sense of coldness, and a want of confidence, which 
you think must provoke my displeasure, — let it take 
what form it may, just come to me, and, if you cannot 
speak for your confusion, just say, in sobs and sighs, 
O my Jesus, my Jesus, my Jesus ! Thou seest my mis- 
ery, Thou knowest I cannot conquer this temptation, 

— yet Thou knowest, too, how I desire to conquer it, 

— and Thou hast told me never to doubt either Thy 
power or Thy love. Allured by Thy promises of cer- 
tain victory in every conflict, I have cast away my own 
strength, and now trust entirely in Thine. And wilt 
Thou deceive me ? never, never ! Though Thou slay 
me, I will trust Thee ! ' 

" You tell me, perhaps, that Christ has not yet re- 
vealed Himself to you in the manner described. Let 
it be so. But has He not thus revealed Himself to 
humanity, to our nature? Is not this the exact 
significance of the Gospel Revelation, taking it as a 
whole ? Is not this just what is meant by the height 
and depth, the length and breadth, of the love of 
Christ, which passeth knowledge? And is He not 



44 



REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 



thus revealed generally, in order that any one who 
will, any one who is athirst for such a Saviour, and 
such a salvation, may make a personal appropriation 
of Him, and of it? and just as minute and particular 
an appropriation as he pleases to make, — too particu- 
lar it cannot be. The true and only foundation of con- 
fidence in Christ is the record which is given in the 
Scriptures of His life and character, of His relations 
to God, and His relations to humanity ; and the motive 
to confidence, — to a personal appropriating faith, is the 
desire of the soul for just such a Saviour, and such a 
salvation, — its deep and everlasting wants, which only 
such a salvation and such a Saviour can relieve. It is 
certainly true, that the faith inspired by the general 
revelation is infinitely vivified by the personal. But 
still the general revelation is the foundation ; and it is 
only by venturing, by suspending the whole weight of 
the soul's cares, desires, and hopes on that revelation, 
and in proportion as we do so, that we can reach any 
thing special and personal. Do you not see that a 
confidence, produced by a particular revelation of His 
affection for you, would be a very poor act on your part, 
a very poor test of the state of your heart toward Him ? 
"Desire the personal expression as strongly as you 
please, thirst for it as the water of Life, for it is so ; 
and be perfectly sure you shall obtain it. Only remem- 
ber that the way to it, to its first, and to every other, 
degree of it, is by faith in the yet unseen. Rejoice 
that your dear Lord gives you the opportunity of show- 



EIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 45 

ing how much you can trust Him. Say to Him boldly, 
I am now so certain of Thy free and immeasurable love, 
that I will henceforth ask for no expression from Thee 
but what is necessary to Thine own glory ; but this I 
must have. I must serve Thee. Thou only art worthy ! 
Whatever is necessary to break in pieces this selfish 
heart, and to create an entirely new heart within me, 
— a heart in which Thou shaft entirely reign, — that is 
all I want. If it is necessary for a farther discovery 
of the root of evil in me, that Thou shouldst withhold a 
little longer the tokens of Thy special regard, behold 
my submission. Only let me have the privilege of 
calling Thee mine, until such time as Thou pleasest 
to give my hand, now outstretched in darkness, that 
firm grasp which shall make it sure for ever." 

To more than one individual did Mr. James write 
an hundred such letters. Indeed, he has scarcely an 
acquaintance that is not in possession of many. From 
no painstaking did he shrink, could he only thus lift 
the burden from a suffering soul. Never did they that 
watch for the morning, wait for the breaking of the 
day with half the anxiety that he did to see the shad- 
ows flee away from a clouded mind. And how he 
rejoiced when his hope was not disappointed ! " The 
note of victorious faith which rings in your later let- 
ters, is more to me than the success of Solferino. 
Your freedom comes nearer home to me than the free- 
dom of Italy, much as I desire the latter," are his 
words. 



46 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

What teacher ever strove harder to instruct ? What 
minister to comfort or build up ? Why should he not 
select his own channels of industry in the vineyard 
where such a variety of husbandry was needed ? Why 
should he chide himself for not assuming the mechani- 
cal toils of a parish, when he was ever lavishly ex- 
pending his strength in the pulpits of his brethren, 
that they might recover theirs? From no desire to 
throw off responsibility, or to rid himself of the obli- 
gations which belong to the sacred office, was he with- 
out a charge. His door-plate, on which was inscribed 
" Rev. William James," bears witness to this. When 
asked, " Why did you have the 'Reverend' engraved 
there ? " he replied, " I was determined that people 
should know that I had not withdrawn myself from 
any duty imposed by my ordination." 

At another time, when wounded by a remark upon 
his recluse and studious habits, he wrote : " How often 
have people said to me, 4 If you had only been a poor 
man, and compelled to work ' ! Compelled to work, 
indeed ! The only effect of poverty would have been 
to make me work for a lower object, and to contract 
the universality and destroy the ideality of my nature. 
Do not let poverty, or the prospect of it, have any such 
effect upon you. I did not need the stimulus of pov- 
erty ; a far stronger stimulus was the disgrace which 
is attached, in this age and country, to a recluse or 
unofficial life. For this I have suffered (for the sake 
of humanity) a conscious martyrdom for many years, 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 47 

to retain my own manhood ; and thus the power of 
serving humanity, whether ever called into action or 
not. How God has sustained me, has been a perfect 
wonder to me. I have been, in the words of the 
Psalmist, ' a wonder unto many,' but also a wonder 
to myself. But God is my strong refuge. Let my 
mouth be filled with Thy praise and Thy honor all the 
day. Cast me not off in my old age ; forsake me not 
when my strength faileth. As the result of this endur- 
ing loyalty to ideas, I am now on the verge of failing 
years, and, possibly, very near my end. But I am in 
possession of a faith, a hope, and a charity, which are 
more than a compensation for all the struggle and the 
sacrifice. Let me, then, entreat you to be of good 
courage. You may have to endure much worldly dis- 
appointment. Till you become indurated, you will 
have to endure it ; but the reward is certain." 

And these words came from a brain and heart that 
(as he once said) did more work in a year than some 
of those who are lashed to work by the thong of pov- 
erty have done in a lifetime. 

His pulpit labors alone were enough to consume the 
vigor and time of most men. He never hesitated to 
preach for weeks and weeks, for churches or minis- 
terial brethren, whose burdens were heavy. And how 
did he preach ? With the truth so deeply planted not 
only in his intellect, but in his sensibilities, it was to 
be expected that Mr. James would be an impressive 
preacher. But when it is remembered, that his voice 



48 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

was like an organ for depth and compass, and also 
resonant with feeling ; and his mode of composition 
such that each separate sentence was full of meaning, 
and closely related to that which went before and fol- 
lowed it, — it is not surprising that he reminded many 
of Robert Hall, in his purity of diction, and in the 
emphasis of his utterance. He organized his thoughts 
slowly and with great deliberation ; hence, when they 
were delivered on the paper or from the pulpit, they 
were almost perfect in their vesture and form. He 
was accustomed to read and meditate much before he 
wrote ; so that his manuscripts contained the invin- 
cible judgments of his soul. And his style of speech 
manifested this. In conversation it was often rapid 
and enthusiastic. From the pulpit it was more meas- 
ured. There he spake " as one having authority." 
His idea of the care in preparation demanded of one 
who would attempt, by interpreting the word of God, 
to guide the souls of men, was expressed somewhat by 
him, when to a friend he said " If I take a text from 
the inspired volume, and do not, to the utmost extent 
of my capacity and powers, fathom and exhaust its 
meaning, I feel that I am a doomed man." Hence, 
great solemnity, and manifest exercise of the reflective 
faculties, characterized his sermons. I refer more par- 
ticularly to those on " God a Sun ; " on the text, " If 
any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink ; " 
the series on the Atonement, and a single sermon on 
Faith. The wonder was, that in the discussion of 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 49 

such themes, in his exhaustive manner, he should 
have made every one of his hearers feel as he did, 
whether they understood him or not, that the fire of 
intense convictions, relating to the life or death of the 
soul, burned in the breast of him who was giving his 
thoughts to them. 

Remarkable, however, as were his sermons, they 
were excelled by his devotional exercises. They moved 
the heart to tears ; they rekindled its hope. No one 
can forget the impression made by them. The mind 
that in preaching, and in conversation, and in medi- 
tation, opened so readily to the being and perfections 
of God, seemed in prayer to be lifted into His actual 
presence. Absolved from the ordinary conditions of 
thought, yet never violating them, Mr. James appeared 
to absorb the affection of the Creator, and to gain a 
vision of the ineffable glory as he approached the 
throne of the heavenly grace. Yet in that august 
pavilion his tones were not those of a stranger, but 
rather those of one to whom the Lord had been and 
would be a dwelling-place in all generations. What 
tenderness, what faith, what adoration were there ! 
what a hiding under the shadow of the Almighty, 
what communion of the finite with the Infinite, what 
earnestness of intercession, what a venturing upon the 
promises! Then it was that " he endured as seeing 
One who is invisible ; and talked with God, as a man 
talketh with his friend." A judge of the Supreme 
Court of Massachusetts, who frequently heard him 

4 



50 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

preach, remarked, " I should be amply repaid for 
coming to church when he is in the pulpit, could I 
hear only the Invocation." 

Many may desire to know more about the natural 
stock, the early associations, the instinctive impulses, 
the human traits of one who could thus live and 
write and preach and pray. His blood was a mixt- 
ure of Irish and Dutch ; Irish on the father's side, and 
Dutch on the mother's. He carried in himself the 
fire and sensibility of the one nation, with the depth 
and power of endurance in the other: an extraordi- 
nary and splendid combination. Withal, he had a 
most vigorous physical constitution, a fine head, a 
glowing, warm, discerning, and expressive eye, a high 
and expansive forehead, a movement indicative of 
power and good breeding ; and a presence that by its 
elevation, frankness, and fearlessness, would vitalize an 
assembly before he spoke a word. The streets, the 
churches, knew when he was in them, by the waves 
of grand impulse he kindled through his unconscious 
motions and look. As was said by one of his friends, 
" the cars were illuminated when he entered them." 
He was not self-conserving ; he sought not his own 
preferment ; he had to be frank by the regal type of 
his nature ; he never assumed a posture or a tone ; his 
manners were the undulation of his morals, and so 
identical with them, that, as with the old Romans, 
but one word, mores, was necessary to express both. 
His manners were the true exponent of his heart. And 



EIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 51 

if occasionally too brusque, and sometimes arrogant, 
when the cerebral excitement to which he was liable 
was upon him, they could not hide the repentance 
which promptly overwhelmed him, when he knew 
that he had wounded the feelings of any one. 

The great organ of his nature was his heart. And 
this, like the ocean or the sun, was constantly dis- 
tributing itself. Were not his sympathies so large and 
so freely given as to eclipse entirely his charities, his 
pecuniary gifts would have seemed worth mention- 
ing. Ask the poor of Albany, — those, for whose 
relief he requested a number of gentlemen to meet 
him when his own funds were exhausted. Ask the 
church at Detroit, to which he gave so largely. Ask 
the persons from Maryland, for whom he collected 
thousands of dollars, and gave much himself, to 
manumit their slaves. Ask the boy that went with 
him at night in the winter months carrying blan- 
kets in the sleigh, when, as in his glee, he described 
it, he " hit twenty-seven ; " that is, relieved that num- 
ber of cases of suffering, in one evening's detour. 
Ask the family of the sick soldier from the neigh- 
borhood of Ogdensburg, whom Mr. James accom- 
panied from the hospital in Albany to his home, that 
the invalid might see his wife and children before he 
died, supplying his every want and those of the in- 
mates of his lowly habitation. Ask the numerous 
clergymen whom he furnished with Olshausen's Com- 
mentary, and other valuable books, that they might 



52 REV, WILLIAM JAMES. 

share his joy in their contents ! And let them record 
their testimony. 

These instances may seem meagre compared with 
those which others were constantly witnessing. But 
are they not sufficient to make it apparent, that, but for 
the private channels in which it flowed, Mr. James 
would have been (perhaps he is) as widely known for 
his generosity as for his unique organization? The 
feeling with which he gave, was worth so much in 
itself, and for what it revealed, that the perishable 
tokens of it sank out of sight. And what shall we 
say of his friendships? They were formed in later 
years somewhat with reference to the capacity or need, 
as he thought, in the subject of them, for spiritual 
relief and advancement. Was it a soul dark for the 
want of an apprehension of the mercy of God in 
Christ, and not repellant or unintelligent in other re- 
spects, he could not withdraw his affection from it, or 
his labors. It was on one of the high hills of Berk- 
shire County, under the shadows of the forests, that he 
stood for a long time talking with a young man on his 
favorite, almost his only, theme, the way of salvation ; 
until at last, finding his words not understood or not 
appreciated, he threw his arms around him, and, hold- 
ing him close to his breast, exclaimed, with great in- 
tensity of emotion, and in deep and troubled murmurs, 
repeating the phrase, "You want doctrine." In this 
mind, his interest never abated through the changes 
and separations of life ; it seemed as if it could never 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 53 

die. After many years, when writing to him, he said : 
" The affairs of all Europe are hardly of as much 
moment to me as those of your individual person. 
Let us keep marching, and keep fighting. If I get 
first to the heights of victory (eternal), what a long 
arm I shall stretch to pull you up to me." 

How many, if they should read this, would say, My 
heart and welfare he thus sought and thus loved. 

I need not say that his more intimate friendships 
were permanent. They could not change or abate. 
The fibre of them was eternal ; the place for their 
exercise chiefly beyond the grave. And yet, with all 
this, he had a great natural heart, with the promptings 
in it which specially warm and dignify and adorn 
mankind. In not a few, the memory of him, in this 
respect, is like the refrain of some great anthem, 
which increases as it comes back in echoes from the 
scenes amidst which its notes were struck, and often 
after the hand which gave them is taken away. 

It was in the latter part of the summer of 1867, that 
a painful and, at last, fatal disorder began to prostrate 
his powers. He thought that God was calling him ; 
and He was. His physicians could not give him a 
great deal of hope. Nor did he need the expectation 
of remaining here to comfort him. He had so often 
thought of the land beyond the river, that its outline 
was very familiar to his imagination. Early in No- 
vember, he wrote in lead pencil, " Since my last to 
you, I have been gradually sinking ; and it is evidently 



54 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

the impression of those around me, as it has long been 
my own, that there is no exit from my complicated 
malady but through the gate of death. There is hardly 
a square inch of my body, below the small of my back, 
which is not the seat of pain. I do not take the sofa, 
of late, nearly as much as formerly, and can read noth- 
ing of any account. But never was there a person as 
low as I am, surrounded with more outward comforts : 
the best of nursing ; the warmest sympathy of friends ; 
delightful letters of affection, particularly from minis- 
ters who have been informed of my extremity. But 
infinitely better still, all is sunshine within. The tree 
is leafless, but the warm sun of Eternal Love is shining 
around me, and the two worlds seem to open into 
each other. I wish I had strength to tell you fully the 
ground of my peace. For six months or more before 
this trouble came upon me, I enjoyed a higher degree 
of communion with God than ever before. To be like 
Him, to have the cursed root of sin eradicated, I 
offered myself up in daily sacrifice ; willing to suffer 
every thing (for I saw plainly that it was only by suffer- 
ing the end could be effected). But, with the first 
clear and real view of approaching judgment, all my 
evidences were of no more account than the drift-wood 
on which the drowning mariner tries to rest amidst the 
surges of the ocean. I never really knew before what 
sin was, nor what my own character was. I saw my- 
self to be the basest of mankind ; ' of whom I am 
chief became as easy as the alphabet. 



EIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 55 

" Still I felt as a child ; quite as anxious that the 
Father, whom I had so injured, should be glorified, as 
that I should be delivered from His wrath ; and now I 
fully appreciate, as I had always pretty well under- 
stood, the meaning of Christ's death. God glorified, and 
my soul certainly saved, by Christ's simply dying for 
me ; without any reference to my own character, dying 
for my sins, — a sense of which alone is necessary to get 
all the benefits of His death. I do not wonder that the 
only song in the upper world is, ' To Him who hath 
loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own 
blood ; to Him,' &c. Soon shall I join in that eternal 
song. 

"No young girl ever felt a more delightful fluttering 
in the prospect of a European tour, than I feel in the 
prospect of soon seeing the land of never-withering 
flowers ; and of seeing Christ, and knowing Him, and 
being known of Him. If any thing favorable occurs, 
you shall hear ; if nothing, then farewell c till we meet 
on the bank of the River of Life/ 

" In death, as in life, yours, w. j." 

Soon after this, he wrote, " In the hour of my deep- 
est distress, God has been nearest to me. I have been 
full of spiritual comfort, even when racked with pain ; 
and all, or the greater part of it, founded not on any 
supposed filial relation to God, but on the sudden over- 
whelming expansion of the idea that Christ died. He 
put His sacred body between the sinner and the curse, 



56 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

so that the severer the trial, the greater and surer the 
blessing to any one who just believes that simple fact. 
I rest in the sweet will of God." 

On Saturday night, the 15th of February, 1868, he 
entered into his rest. Though his sickness had been 
long, and his sufferings severe, his joy was deep and full. 
" It is all joy, joy, joy ! " were among his last con- 
scious words. Three days before he departed, he said, 
"My faith is perfect. As I have not produced it, I 
may speak of it thus : It is like the sun, or, rather," 
he continued, "it is like the natural sense we have of 
the sunlight, — quite adequate to reveal the things it is 
designed to reveal." At another time, when his de- 
parture seemed full in view, he said, " The other side 
is sunny. I call it sunny, because I see only God in 
the unclouded heavens." — "I expect neither surprise 
nor disappointment in the future. Whatever may be 
in it, I know that the same God is there whom I have 
known here, and I trust Him." — "My mind is all 
ready for a shout at the vision of the exceeding glory." 
— " Nothing is so precious to me as that Christ died 
for us ; I hear a voice saying, ' These are they which 
have washed their robes and made them white in the 
blood of the Lamb.'" With such words as these, 
spontaneously uttered, he was frequently refreshing 
those who were permitted to watch the shadows de- 
parting, while his soul entered more clearly into the 
dawning and into the day. 



HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER. 57 

The last words dictated by him for his daughter, 
about a week before his death, were these : — 

" I could neither expect nor desire more outward 
comfort than I have ; but oh, my dear child, this is a 
small matter in comparison with the trust in my 
Heavenly Father, which flows on in a constant 
stream, no more to be shaken or changed than one's 
faith in the declarations of a Father's love. God's 
word, revealing His full character to me, is the foun- 
tain at which I quench my perpetual thirst for the 
knowledge of His love to me. I find this fountain 
not only free as water, but as satisfying as water 
itself!" 

Thus he that, in his early days, and in his maturer 
manhood, " thirsted" for holiness, came to the fountain 
of the River of Life, and to the paradise of God, 
where they thirst no more. 

" O si sit anima i7iea cum te" 



LETTERS. 



LETTERS 



" Albany, June 22, i860. 

" A/T Y DEAR • If l remember aright, the last 

-L*-»- words of my last letter were, that I would 
now proceed to remove your difficulties in appro- 
priating and realizing the great promise of Christ's 
dwelling in you by His Spirit. These difficulties are 
all concentrated in a legal construction of gospel re- 
quirements. You cannot read, for example, such a 
passage as John xiv. 21-23, without getting the im- 
pression that the promise there given is conditioned 
upon something to be done which is distinct from, and 
subsequent to, believing ; viz., upon loving Christ, 
and manifesting our love by keeping His command- 
ments. 

" It must not be questioned, that the design of our 
Saviour in these words was to excite His disciples in 
all ages to spiritual activity. This was the design of 
all His words, as it was of the words of the Apostles 
afterwards. But there are two classes of motives by 
which the activity of the soul may be stimulated, 
which are just the antipodes of each other ; viz., the 



62 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

certainty of the object sought and its uncertainty, — its 
certainty arising from the infallibility of the Saviour's 
love ; its uncertainty arising from the fallibility of ours. 
To Christians, in so far as they are under the law, 
which they should not be at all, it cannot but appear 
to be the design of our Saviour in this passage to stim- 
ulate His disciples to greater watchfulness and dili- 
gence, that they may thereby insure their participation 
in the higher blessings of grace, and then they cannot 
but rest in the fidelity of their own efforts as the essen- 
tial condition of their attainments. But before they 
can be conscious of any progress, their spiritual 
activity must cease to be damped by any such uncer- 
tainty. In resting upon Christ alone as their law- 
fulfiller, they must see that they are virtually obeying 
the whole commandment of the Gospel ; for in no 
other way can love be generated. Hence, in the 
phraseology of the disciple of love, of the Gospel of 
John, believing, loving, and obeying mean, as nearly 
as possible, the same thing ; the first being the living 
root, the others in due season the certain fruit. Noth- 
ing is so necessary, I am persuaded, for the removal of 
your chief difficulties as your perfect settlement upon 
this principle, — that faith is so peculiarly the condition 
of gospel holiness, that the attainment of the latter is 
certain, only provided that you avoid conditioning it 
on any thing else ; and for the support of this prin- 
ciple, I can do nothing more pertinent than to give 
you my own exposition of the passage referred to, 



LETTERS. 63 

John xiv. 20-24, showing definitively to whom those 
promises are made, and how, or in what way, they are 
actually fulfilled. 

"Preliminarily, however, to such an exposition, I 
must ask your attention to a few words on the occasion 
and design of our Lord's last address to his disciples, 
in the midst of which this passage occurs ; for there is 
no so common cause of our partial understanding of 
the Scriptures as our habit of dwelling upon single 
verses, and, as it often happens, upon single words, 
without sufficiently considering the occasion on which 
they were spoken, and the spirit in which they were 
uttered. 

" Observe then, first, that the special design of all this 
portion of the Scriptures, from chap. xiii. to chap, xvii., 
inclusive, was (in connection with giving instruction) 
pre-eminently to strengthen the weak and the dejected. 
The idea that our Lord had it in His mind on such an 
occasion to lay down tests or conditions which should 
throw the slightest uncertainty on the future prospects 
of those whom He addressed, is so incongruous with 
the sympathetic movements of His soul, as evinced 
in the whole address, that it refutes itself. Who were 
the persons, what was their quality, from whom He 
could not separate until He had made them as certain 
as He then could make them of the glory which should 
succeed their temporary darkness? Upon the first 
trial all forsook Him, and one of them, who was 
thought to love Him most, with oaths and curses 



64 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

denied Him. Can you conceive, then, that He should 
have made the glory which He was promising them 
conditional upon a character which they had yet to 
attain, and which, possibly, they might never reach? 
How entirely would such a conception, had there been 
any foundation for it in their minds, have withered all 
the consolation of the address, and frustrated its chief 
design ! 

" Bear in mind, secondly, that up to, and at this very 
time, the eleven whom He addressed were still pos- 
sessed with the common Jewish notion, that the Mes- 
siah's kingdom was to be a world-wide theocracy, a 
manifestation to the nations, and not otherwise to the 
individual soul. They had as yet but the faintest idea 
of the nature of His kingdom as inward and spiritual. 
The three several inquiries of Thomas, Philip, and 
Judas, not Iscariot, arose out of their bewilderment 
upon this subject. Hence the great design of our 
Saviour in this 14th chapter (the whole of which is an 
answer to their inquiries), is, after comforting their 
human personal feelings, or in connection with that, 
to initiate them into the elementary principles of spir- 
itual Christianity, and through them to initiate us and 
all mankind ; for elementary as these principles are, 
and common as they have become to us through a 
Christian education, they transcend all the knowledge 
of natural reason. The love with which He had in- 
spired them was such, that His intimation of being 
about to leave them had filled them with consterna- 



LETTERS. 65 

tion, while it unsettled all their theories of the nature 
of His coming kingdom. How they might still com- 
municate with Him after His departure, and how He 
intended to carry on the work, which, in passing from 
the earth, He left unfinished, were the questions in 
which they were vitally absorbed ; and these are the 
subjects in which our Saviour aims to instruct them. 
In the verses we are explaining, His design is to show 
them how He could manifest Himself to them and 
not unto the world ; how He could come to them and 
abide with them, without that visible or bodily glorifica- 
tion before the world, with which all their ideas of 
manifestation had been associated. 

" His telling them that He was going to his Father, 
and that, too, through the common gate of mortality, 
seemed to leave them as dependent on the absolute 
God as theV had been before His coming, and subject, 
of course, to all that uncertainty as to their future des- 
tiny which this idea must ever awaken in the human 
conscience. How natural the language of Philip, 
1 Show us the Father ; give us some manifestation by 
which we may know, without any perplexity hereafter, 
how He is affected towards us ' ! How complete the 
reply : c I am that manifestation ; for all vital pur- 
poses, he that hath seen me hath seen the Father ; 
though personally distinct, we are yet so united in 
character, affection, and purpose, that as I have done 
nothing hitherto in your behalf, except as directed by 
Him, you may be certain that He will do nothing 

5 



66 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

hereafter apart from me. As He is so much the 
object of my love that I could not have come to earth 
but by His order, I, on the other hand, am so much 
the object of His love, that after my departure you 
may depend on His doing whatever I request for you : 
and though you have derived so much instruction, 
strength, and comfort from my personal presence and 
teachings, these are but a pledge of something far 
higher, which rny Father, at my request, will do for 
you after I have ascended ; for in my name, — that is, 
at my instigation, — He will send you another Com- 
forter, who will abide with you for ever. Not to the 
world, observe, for the world, as such, cannot receive 
Him, having no susceptibility for His communications, 
which relate altogether to me ; and what interest has 
the world in me? Therefore, "it seeth Him not, 
neither knoweth Him, but ye know Him" (i.e., speak- 
ing by anticipation, shall know Him) ; for your interest 
in me is such that you cannot fail to receive the mes- 
senger whom I send, and through whom my Father and 
I will hereafter for ever manifest ourselves to you. I 
cannot be manifested to the world as you have been 
expecting, because the nature of the Spirit's manifesta- 
tions of me is such that the world has no interest in 
them. The world loveth me not, and no prospect of 
communion with me could induce it to forsake any 
of its unspiritual ways, or to keep any of those sayings 
or commandments with which such communion is 
necessarily connected. But in you who truly love me, 



LETTERS. 67 

whose deepest concern is to abide in my love, and to 
keep those sayings of mine by which your love shall 
be manifested, in you the Spirit, which represents both 
me and my Father, shall take up his abode. " At that 
day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in 
me and I in you."' 

" Such, beyond a question, is the true meaning of 
these verses, or the spirit of them, rather, for their more 
precise meaning I purpose hereafter to unfold. Their 
immediate design is to show the disciples why it is and 
how it is, that, while the world shall see Him no more, 
His presence with them shall be perpetual. Whilst 
there shall be no such manifestation to the eye of the 
world as they have been expecting, there shall be a 
manifestation to them which shall keep up their per- 
sonal relations with Him — the great point of their 
present anxiety — for ever. The promise is not condi- 
tional, but absolute ; for, though made to a particular 
class of persons, the quality in them which insures its 
fulfilment, which is not their merit, but simply their 
moral susceptibility, or their capacity to be affected by 
promises like these, is assumed. The promise is to 
those of every age of time, who, with an abiding con- 
sciousness of sin, have, at the same time, such a desire 
for purity or fellowship with God, that a being like 
Christ, who, blending in His Divine humanity the 
sacredness of the skies with the sympathies of clay, de- 
scends from heaven only to conduct them thither, can- 
not fail to be the object of their supreme affection, as 



68 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

His sayings and commandments must be the matter 
of their most earnest meditation. 

" Having given you this general view of the occa- 
sion and design of the passage, the settlement of the 
two points already stated will fulfil the purpose of my 
letter. Who are the persons to whom the promise is 
made ; and how, in their case, is the promise fulfilled ? 

" It is made to those who love Christ, and keep His 
commandments. What is meant by loving Christ? 
We love those who love us ; we love them in propor- 
tion to the sacrifices they make for us, and we love 
them inexpressibly, when they are so much our supe- 
riors, that we cannot tell w r hy they should love us at 
all. Can you not affirm that you thus love the Saviour? 
Can you not say with Peter, ' Thou who knowest all 
things, knowest that I love Thee.' Answer directly 
from your consciousness, as Peter did, in view simply 
of the report which the gospel brings of the person 
of Christ and His love to you, and without respect to 
any doctrines about what love to Christ should be, in 
which you may have been educated. You have had 
the idea that the fellowship which Christ offers you is 
burthened with difficult conditions. But suppose you 
could be persuaded that this was an entire misconcep- 
tion ; that the primary requirement of the gospel is 
not that you should love Him, but that you should 
repose with unchanging confidence on the assurance 
of His love to you, — no love or service being desired 
or expected of you but such as this faith will secure 



LETTERS. 69 

according to its strength spontaneously generated, the 
real demand being for faith, and for faith alone, faith 
in His love under all possible conditions : do you not 
believe, that if this view — which, you must perceive, 
contains the quintessence of the gospel, instead of 
being a theory merely — were to become a vital reality, 
— w T hich it will become exactly in proportion as you 
act upon it, — that you "would soon be able to answer 
with Peter, ' Thou knowest that I love Thee ' ? The 
love, then, is there ; the only or principal obstruction 
to its development and consciousness being, that its 
object has never been adequately or clearly conceived. 
Tell me, farther, are you not conscious that your deep- 
est want is not of affection simply, but of affection 
combined with purity, — the love of a higher nature, 
but of a nature which in loving will purify and exalt 
you. It is not peace simply that you seek, but peace 
unto purification. By a necessity which no power of 
will can change, your affections (I speak of their 
natural state) — made, as you cannot but know, to find 
their happiness in a conscious alliance with the All- 
True, the All-Good, and the All-Fair — are not reduced 
to the alternative of for ever pursuing an illusion, or at 
once yielding to despair. Here is the whole of your 
trouble : your heart, made distrustful by sin of the only 
Being whose love can satisfy you, is ever tempted to 
seek a substitute for His affections in visions of earthly 
bliss, which, however warmly you pursue, you know you 
can never embrace. Were it but possible that the higher 



^O REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

nature, without any degradation to itself, could em- 
brace you just as you are, and hold you in its embrace 
till you were completely purified ! Oh, could the All- 
Good and the All-Fair but give you the assurance that 
He would descend to you in your unhappy state, and 
love you with a love that should never change ; could He 
give you the assurance that He had begun to deliver 
you from the bondage of corruption ; that you were 
encircled by the arms of His love and wisdom, — of 
which the one should direct, and the other support 
you, through all the trials of your pilgrimage path, 
— till sin and sorrow shall be totally merged in the 
everlasting brightness of the heavenly horizon ; and not 
content with a verbal assurance of this by the mouth 
of a messenger, should He come Himself in the like- 
ness of your own sinful flesh, and first removing that 
greatest hindrance to an entrance into the Holiest, 
which arises from an ever-accusing conscience, make 
His own soul an expiatory offering for all your sin, 
past and future, in this respect, by that one offering 
6 perfecting you for ever' (Heb. x. 14) ; and then, be- 
fore returning to His Father and your Father, to His 
heaven and your heaven, should He, though His soul 
is exceeding sorrowful in prospect of the sufferings be- 
fore Him, as the burthen of His last address to you, to 
guard you in every conceivable way against future dis- 
couragement, saying, ' Let not your heart be troubled ; 
for though I am going away, it is to receive the reward 
of my sufferings, — a reward of which, in due season, 



LETTERS. 



71 



you shall be a partaker with me ; I go to fulfil an 
office for you in my state of glory, without which my 
sufferings for you would be to no purpose ; I go to 
prepare a place for you in my Father's house, from 
which I will soon return and take you to myself; that 
where I am there you may be also, never more to be 
separated ; and, meanwhile, our separation shall be 
only outward ; I will not leave you comfortless ; in a 
way of which you shall soon have an experience, I 
will manifest myself to you ; I cannot, indeed, prom- 
ise you an exemption from worldly trials ; and that you 
may not be offended when they come, I feel it neces- 
sary to impress it upon you that from such trials, 
and manifold too, there can be no discharge. 0?zly 
be of good cheer : all power is committed to me in 
heaven and on earth ; the world of nature and the 
world of spirits are so entirely under my control that 
nothing can befall you but with my co-operatioa ; 
and be assured that no trial shall be permitted but that 
(with faith in me) may be easily borne, and shall issue 
in a deeper and abiding peace ; ' — tell me would not 
this be a true — is it not the only true — presentation 
of Christ, of his character and his relations to our fallen 
humanity? And, as thus presented, have you a mo- 
ment's hesitation in saying, ; Lord, Thou knowest that 
I love Thee ' ? t Ah,' but you say, ' the great proof of 
love to Christ is, that we keep his commandments, and 
herein I am conscious of a signal deficiency : I have 
no evidence of this sort upon which I can rely for a 



72 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

moment.' And do you really suppose that Peter's 
answer to the question, Lovest thou me, which you 
cannot doubt was a true one, and most acceptable to 
his Master, was founded upon the proofs which he had 
given of it (a singular test for him) ; that it was the 
result of a particular self-examination, of the discovery 
of some tolerable conformity between his life and his 
obligations? Is it not obvious, upon the slightest re- 
flection, that it was simply a burst of feeling quick- 
ened by a sense of his miserable failures and the 
amazingly manifested love of such a superior Being, 
to one wholly unworthy? 'Ah,' but you say, 'there 
was at least repentance/ Well, if you would conceive 
of Christ as being always to you just what He was to 
Peter, always your friend, and peculiarly so when con- 
scious of having fallen (your ordinary state perhaps), 
would there not be the same power of repentance 
always in you, and therefore always the same ready 
response, 'Thou knowest that I love Thee'? 

" Depend upon it that this susceptibility to the 
claims of Christ upon our supreme affection — though 
painfully conscious as yet of the power of rival affec- 
tions, of which we would fain be delivered — is the 
kernel of the whole matter, the germ of a perfect sanc- 
tification. If you have but this, though you have noth- 
ing beyond it, you are the person to whom the prom- 
ise is made. The fulness of the love of God is first 
manifested to us, attracts and moves us, in the person- 
ality of the Son of man, so worthy of supreme love. 



LETTERS. 73 

Love in us is, at bottom, that response of the heart to 
which we are moved by a sense of the adaptation of 
such condescension to our helpless necessities. The 
'keeping' of the commandments, to which the promise 
is made, is primarily that posture of believing-loving, 
or loving-believing attention and regard to His words, 
which is produced by the dependence of our hearts 
upon Him. It is the sighing to be more conformed to 
Him. It is that repenting, coming, praying, hoping, 
believing, waiting, which His promises have inspired, 
and which is all that we can do in our present weak- 
ness. These are pre-eminently and first of all His com- 
mandments. The desire to ' keep ' avails, in the sight 
of grace, as if it were the full performance. For such 
as would fain love and keep, in the fullest sense, but 
cannot for the want of farther strength, the great man- 
ifestation is just as certain as that the splendors of day 
shall succeed the dimness of earliest dawn. Theirs is 
the blessedness of that hunger which shall certainly be 
filled ; of those beginnings of purity, though at present 
mainly indicated by a sense of the contrary, which 
shall soon be perfected by the full vision of God. 

"They have only to avoid the error, so fatal to peace 
and progress, of conceiving the love of Christ as con- 
ditioned on theirs, and of His promises as being other 
than absolute. If that fountain which has been opened 
in their hearts by thus ' seeing the Son, and believing 
on Him,' can be kept open, — kept living, though its 
streams at present scarcely flow, being obstructed by 



74 



REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 



so many obstacles, — a manifestation awaits them, than 
which there is nothing higher or greater for man. ' At 
that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye 
in me and I in you.' 

" What is meant by this promise, and how it is 
actually fulfilled, shall be the subject (the Spirit help- 
ing) of a future letter. 

u And now, my child, ' for whom I travail in birth 
till Christ be formed in you,' let your mind be fixed on 
this single point, that the love of Christ to you, not 
yours to Him in the slightest degree, must be your 
whole dependence. Study yourself if you please, for 
you cannot well help it, but only for the purpose of 
taking a larger and firmer grasp of the hand of your 
Lord. To keep your mind properly occupied, which 
is a great matter, I send you the best expositor of the 
Gospel of John, for its size, in any language ; much 
better for you than Stier's, which I had designed to 
send ; though, I am happy to say, they are entirely har- 
monious with each other. You will find no difficulty 
in reading it, as the Greek is generally translated. 
Both in the kind and amount of help which the reading 
of Olshausen may bring you, you may be a little dis- 
appointed ; but, here and there, there are thoughts 
which may live in you for ever. The longer you keep 
the book, the better I shall be pleased ; and, if there 
should be a demand for the other volumes of his com- 
mentary, I shall be greatly delighted. For myself, I 
have always another copy on hand. 



LETTERS. 



75 



" Remember, farther, that the issue of your thus de- 
pending entirely on Christ's love to you, will be the 
deepening and strengthening of your love to Him. 
What you really want, is His love of complacency, 
not alone His love of conpassion ; not merely ' you in 
Him,' which is equivalent to a sense of justification, 
but, above all, ' Him in you,' which is equivalent to 
sanctification. And this is what He has promised as 
the end of your keeping His sayings or command- 
ments, of which the great characteristic, as distin- 
guished from those of a strictly legal character, is this : 
that the latter, as Olshausen says, in page 558 of the 
volume I send you, are naked injunctions ; the others 
contain in themselves the power for their own perform- 
ance. If Christ commands, He gives, in the command 
itself, the power of fulfilling it. Thus He commands 
us to love. Love is the essence and end of all His 
commands ; but it is that love of which faith (faith in 
His love) is the root. The whole commandment, then, 
is not love alone, but faith also, which gives the power 
to love. If love is the fruit, faith is the root. If 
love is the end of the commandment, as Paul says, 
1 Tim. i. 5, faith is its beginning ; not, observe, in the 
order of time, but in the order of nature : there is always 
just as much love as there is faith. But as faith grows 
into a habit of depending, leaning upon Christ's bosom 
and finding His succor in your trials, love will grow in 
the same ratio, until, at length, not only will the easier 



j6 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

sayings of Christ be fulfilled, but there will be a grow- 
ing consciousness of entire self-sacrifice, and with that 
there will come a growing consciousness of the Divine 
complacency, — the highest goal of human aspira- 
tions." 



II. 



" Albany, Dec. 25, 1867. 

" 1VF Y DEAR — ■ ° n Sunda y> the 9 th > 1 g ave 

-*-*-*- up truly and perfectly all my hope for earth. 
The old symptoms of disease came back upon me 
with such power, that there was no resisting the con- 
viction that the premonitory tokens of the great 
change were upon me. 

" Since God uses instruments to accomplish His gra- 
cious purposes, I write now with the strong hope that 
He will once more employ my humble instrumentality 
to still further strengthen your faith, and revive the 
spirit of the contrite one. I have a doctrine to pro- 
claim to you, which you know, which we have both 
known, which, more than any other, lies at the founda- 
tion of all true Christian experience, but which has 
been brought home to me, recently, with a power of 
which I never had any experience before. 

" It is only for the sake of setting the doctrine in the 
clearest light, that I must ask you to let me give 
you an outline of my spiritual history for some time 
past. In a weak, a dreadfully weak, manner, I have 
been always contending with the selfishness of my 



78 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

heart, never conquering, but never yielding ; that is, 
never giving up the hope of a conquest at last. To 
come down to the last six months (though what I 
say of this period has been true, in a great degree, 
for a much longer time), my sense of the hateful- 
ness of this moral leprosy, and yet of my helpless- 
ness to get rid of it, has been so acute, that I have 
rejoiced in suffering which would give a deliverance 
from this deep-rooted malady. Some occurrences in 
Providence, of a very small kind in themselves, were 
the occasion of opening my eyes to a more humiliating 
view of my character and life, than I had ever had, 
and, at the same time, awakening the profoundest 
grief and repentance. I was not rebellious, but gave 
my cheek to the smiter. Together with the repent- 
ance, I had what I may say was the first clear, un- 
clouded, unmixed view of the character and relation 
to me of God, as a Father, that I ever had in my life ; 
the first really natural view, every other view being a 
compromise of the simple declaration of the Scriptures 
with the reasonings and results of speculative theol- 
ogy. From that time until my great trouble came upon 
me, I was rejoicing in God as pure love, — as full of 
love as the sun is of light. During that time, I wrote 
on the subject, and preached, as all testify, as I never 
did before. But there was one subject on which I was 
yet dark and felt my darkness, and prayed continually 
that it might be removed ; that was the exact relation 
of the atonement to the reconciliation which seemed 



LETTERS. 



19 



so perfect. I had, as I have always had, the common 
dogmatic views which are held by the Church on this 
subject. But those views had never had any such 
effect upon my heart as the simple view of the love of 
God now had. About this I was troubled : I could 
not doubt, somehow, that the late speculations on the 
subject of the atonement were wrong. I could not 
reconcile them with the Scriptures, and yet all my 
experience, as well as my reflection, was pushing me 
in that direction. I never could settle in those views, 
and yet I knew not how to escape them. I prayed 
continually that God, by His Spirit, would make this 
matter plain to me. This was my state of mind when 
I went to New York for medical advice. 

" But about my bodily malady while there, I had very 
little concern. Another concern, infinitely more terrible, 
took possession of me in the hours of my deep retire- 
ment. As by a flash of lightning from the judgment- 
seat, I was at once prostrated by a clear apprehension 
of sin. My whole spiritual fabric, which I have all my 
life been building, — and which just before had seemed 
so beautifully illuminated by the love of God, — fell 
into a shapeless ruin. Conscience was stirred to its 
lowest depths. The one sin which first attracted my 
attention, hardly even seriously thought of before, but 
now made so clear, was merely the entering wedge ; my 
whole heart was laid open, and it seemed to be noth- 
ing but a nest of vipers ; my whole life seemed nothing 
but one tissue of corruption. I saw all the good there 



80 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

was about it as clearly as ever ; my perpetual struggle 
with evil, the many manifestations I have had of God's 
favor, my successes over particular temptations, — all 
these stood in my mind just as they had stood before. 
But I saw that all these were very superficial and com- 
paratively external, as evidences of a justified or sancti- 
fied state. They were overshadowed by one vast sin, 
which filled my whole vision, and overwhelmed me 
with shame and humiliation. How shall I give you an 
idea of the nature of the sin ? It may be expressed in 
a single word, — unbelief, or the non-appreciation of 
Christ. At once I saw, almost as by a new sense (though 
it was simply the old sense intensely acuminated), the 
man Christ Jesus, — the sent-of-God to save a sinful, 
self-destroyed race. No vision of the senses could be 
more real, or hardly more distinct ; it was just as impres- 
sive as if He had come to save me alone. I saw Him 
in all His searching pureness, and in all His inexpres- 
sible love ; the gift of the Father (like the sun in the 
heavens) to illuminate a dark world ; the Light of 
man to point out, by His example eminently, and by 
His precepts, what man may be and ought to be ; and 
with this, the Friend of man, nearer than any brother, 
full of love to him, and with all power to help him, 
— a love which carried Him to a death of ignominy, 
from which He was raised, by the power of the 
Father, still in His exalted state, to be the friend 
and brother of man, — to be not merely present to 
him outwardly, but by His Spirit to be in him ; a 



LETTERS. 8 1 

union not moral merely, depending on man's good 
behavior, — however that might affect the sense of 
it, — but spiritual and everlasting, depending on His 
mysterious love. This is the gospel, in the light of 
which I have been walking all my life ; and how has 
my life corresponded to it? What influence has it had 
upon my character? Such has been His devotion to 
me, what has been mine to Him ? If I had had a real 
faith in this Man, — this gift of the Father's love, and 
Himself the Father's love, in its liveliest possible ex- 
emplification, how could it have been that my whole 
life, in all its inward breathings and outward expres- 
sions, would have been any thing else but one continuous 
act of love and devotion to Him ? How I should have 
felt Him ever with me, before me as my guide, within 
me as my comforter, behind me as the rock of my sup- 
port, enabling me to look down with simple pity upon 
the world, whose vain opinion I have so much courted, 
and to avoid whose censure I have so constantly re- 
frained from every thing like a bold, aggressive pro- 
fession ! How plain it became to me that I had never 
really or thoroughly believed on Him ! This is what 
I mean by sin : not accepting this light of the world, 
and constantly walking in it, just as I accept and walk 
in the light of the noonday sun. ' Of sin, because 
they believe not in me;' believing in Him, or rather 
in certain doctrines about Him, only with the view of 
preserving peace of conscience, but not giving my 
whole heart and every action of my life to Him. I 

6 



82 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

now saw clearly what is meant by a personal union 
with Christ, by a being in Him, as the branch is in the 
vine ; and I was as clearly conscious that this had 
never been the nature of my union with Him, for that 
had been compulsory, an external thing. In view of all 
this, I found myself a sinner ; and a sinner, considering 
my peculiar advantages, of the most aggravated char- 
acter. My condemnation was certain ; all past expe- 
riences I utterly renounced. I did not want to be 
saved in virtue of any such miserable stuff. I wanted 
a real salvation, — a salvation direct from God, 
in perfect harmony with His perfections, given not 
merely because I was a miserable perishing creature, 
the proper object of compassion (though I made much 
use of this plea), but because he could give it justly 
and holily, without a shadow of loss to His own honor. 
And, observe farther, the salvation I wanted was sim- 
ply forgiveness ; nothing else had any sort of con- 
gruity with my case. The sword of offended Justice 
was impending over me. Regeneration could not 
save me, even if it were possible to have it. I felt 
that I had repentance, and that was a great comfort to 
me ; though still, as I apprehended my sin, I could not 
build any confidence upon my repentance. I wanted 
forgiveness, not_ merely deliverance from wrath, but 
some sign of the love of the Father and the grace of 
the Saviour, whom I had so deeply offended, and 
whose frown was eternal sorrow, grief without remedy. 
God appeared to me not at all as an angry despot, 



LETTERS. 83 

but as a most loving Father ; and Christ as my loving 
Saviour. The dread which was upon my spirit, was 
not of some mysterious penalty in another world, an 
infliction of evil, but of separation from the source of 
all love, — from the bosom of a Father, and particu- 
larly from that blessed Being who had given His life 
for man. The forgiveness, of which I felt such a need, 
implied the return of those affections to me ; that was 
what I wanted, — that was salvation. 

" The only particle of light that gave me any hope 
here w r as Christ's sacrificial suffering. Whether or 
not I should ever receive the benefit of the atonement, 
it was now just as clear as that Christ came into the 
world, that He came specially, eminently, above every 
other part of His mission, for the purpose of dying for 
sin, for the purpose of taking the sinner's place in the 
eye of the law and justice, so that the sinner could feel 
that there was no moral necessity for his punishment ; 
and that God could be just, and yet forgive him bound- 
lessly. I could no longer doubt that this is just what 
all those scriptural expressions, about Christ's dying 
for us, mean. I could not avoid seeing that if that is 
not the gospel, it would be no more suited to one in 
my condition, which is, at some time or other, the 
universal condition, than a code of morals. I knew 
that God was good, loving, merciful, &c. ; but I 
just as well knew, and at present far more im- 
pressively, that He was just also. Of the possibil- 
ity of forgiveness in a way of righteousness, then 



84 REV. WILLIAM JAMES. 

I entertained not the slightest misgiving. It was all 
my comfort, while my own individual case was doubt- 
ful ; but that was still doubtful. I saw that I was 
quite as properly a subject for justice as for mercy ; 
that nothing could be more exactly righteous, than that 
I should be excepted, if any one, and there certainly 
are many, from the provisions of grace. Though the 
doctrine of Christ's sacrifice saved me from despair, I 
had not the faith which could assure me of a deliver- 
ance from the penalty, — the penalty of abusing grace. 
It seemed most righteous that grace so abused should 
vindicate itself in turning a deaf ear to my supplica- 
tions. I saw plainly that Christ's work merely put it 
in God's power to save me, if He chose to do so ; and 
that if I, so properly a subject for justice, were saved 
through the great sacrifice, it must be only of God's 
good pleasure. Though I dwelt then continually 
upon the Saviour's death, as the only thing that made 
salvation possible, I felt after all, that, as an indi- 
vidual, I depended on God's sovereign determination. 
Oh, how I bowed before His sovereignty ! how 
I acknowledged from my heart His right to do as He 
pleased with me ! how I humbled myself, and cut 
myself loose from every thing but His sovereign 
pleasure ! But here came in for my relief all that I 
knew, and all that the Scriptures testify, of His nature, 
as inclined to mercy, as full of love, as not willing that 
any should perish, &c. Oh, the sweetness of those 
innumerable passages, which give this account of 



LETTERS. 85 

Him. I preferred, therefore, lying in His sovereign 
hands, to putting in any plea or claim founded even 
on the great sacrifice. I rather asked that He would 
embolden me to make that claim ; that, having given 
His Son to die for me, He would now, of the same 
free goodness, give His Spirit to inspire me with faith, 
and make the work of Christ effectual in me. Here 
is where I stand, or rather lie, at present. 

" I have no dependence but upon God's forgiveness 
of my sin through the atonement. But my peace is 
without interruption. My sufferings increase, but so 
does the strength by which I am supported, which I 
am sure is exhaustless. ' Whom He loveth He chas- 
teneth,' satisfies every doubt, and gives a kind of pleas- 
ure to the pain. I love to endure what His loving 
hand lays upon me. My sky seems more cloudless 
as I advance. The everlasting love illumines alike 
both worlds. In our Father's house are many man- 
sions." 



SERMONS. 



I. 

THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 

" The kingdom of Heaven is like unto a certain king, which 
made a marriage for his son.'" — Matt. xxii. 2. 

TN Oriental poetry, a specimen of which we 
have in the 45th Psalm, the union of a ruler 
with his subjects is sometimes treated as if it were 
a marriage union, the nation being the bride and 
the prince the bridegroom. Whatever might have 
been the origin of this conception, in the actual 
relations and intercourse of such parties there is 
generally but little correspondence with the figure. 
But in the Kingdom, the advent of which was 
announced by the Messiah, particularly in its 
final consummation, this conception shall be fully 
realized. It is no mere figure or fiction, that the 
King of heaven has made a marriage for his Son. 
What is the gospel but a Divine solicitation for 
the hand of humanity? 

Every individual soul, which truly responds to 
this solicitation, becomes thereby a member of that 



90 SERMONS. 

holy community which, in the winding-up of 
the affairs of Time, shall be presented to the 
universe as the bride, the Lamb's wife, the ob- 
ject of his chief affection and the partner of his 
royal honors. Then it is that the marriage shall 
be celebrated, for which the preaching of the 
gospel through all the intervening ages has been 
the grand preparation. Then, when the number 
of the elect shall be finished, when the redeemed 
from the earth out of every kindred and tribe and 
nation shall be fully gathered, then shall be heard 
in heaven the voice of a great multitude, as the 
voice of many waters and of mighty thunderings. 
saying, w Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor 
to Him ; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, 
and His Bride hath made herself ready." In mak- 
ing ready the Bride, in preparing for this scene of 
unimaginable bliss, the gospel, as we have already 
intimated, is the great instrumentality. The gos- 
pel declares the terms of this union on the part 
of God, and furnishes the motive to their accept- 
ance on the part of man. The subject, then, to 
which I shall ask your attention, is the instrumen- 
tality of the gospel in effecting a heart reconcili- 
ation between God and man. As reconciliation 
supposes a previous but broken union, to explain 
the nature of that union, the union originally ex- 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 9 1 

isting between the soul and God shall be our first 
object. 

The original relation of the soul to God was 
not the relation of a subject to a governor, nor of 
a servant to a master. It was not what w r e call a 
law relation, but wholly a love relation, the dis- 
tinction between which consists in this, — that, in 
the latter, the first, last, and only aim of the 
Higher party is to promote the happiness of the 
object loved. In a law relation, on the contrary, 
His supreme and most manifest regard is to His 
own rights, honor, and authority. In a purely 
love relation, obedience is never sought to be 
secured by an exhibition of authority, exciting, 
in the inferior party, an apprehension of penalty. 
That was the curse which sin brought with it. 
The obedience of the soul was prompted purely 
by love, or by a sense of God's infinite affection. 
And in this consisted its original integrity : it w r as 
the reign of legitimate love. And that is what 
is meant by the kingdom of heaven, or the rule 
of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is not any 
visible social organization : it is the reign of 
purity ; that is, of legitimate love in the individ- 
ual soul. The force of the word "legitimate" 
will be better understood when we consider, sec- 
ondly, the manner and circumstances of the fall. 



92 SERMONS. 

To this purpose we observe, that, as the soul 
was made to find her happiness in loving, and 
her highest happiness in loving God, she was so 
made, also, in His wondrous beneficence, as to be 
capable of an inferior but yet a most heart-felt en- 
joyment in the communications of creatures* In 
giving Himself to her, God gave her, also, a 
magnificent endowment out of Himself. 

"The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord's : 
but the earth hath He given to the children of 
men." — "Thou madest him a little lower than 
the angels ; thou crownedest, him with glory and 
honor; thou hast put all things in subjection 
under his feet." Such was the condition of the 
soul on the day of its creation ; endowed with a 
terrestrial paradise, — that is, with every means 
of worldly gratification, — and this was the occa- 
sion of its fall. You may wonder, indeed, how 
this gross, material world could tempt this son 
and heir of the Eternal ; how the soul, born with 
the high capacity for union with the Divine, and 
actually standing in the Divine fellowship, could 
yield to so base a competitor. But consider how 
the temptation prevailed. Was it through the 
mere violence of natural desire, overbearing all 
regard to the commands of the Creator? Was 
the fall the effect of a bold, deliberate act of trans- 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 93 

gression? Why, sin, even in our fallen state, does 
not begin in that way, though that is the end of 
it. It begins in this way : God is too good to 
inflict so great a penalty for so small a deviation. 
Can He consign me to death for desiring, only a 
little too eagerly, a gratification, for which the 
nature He has given me was evidently made? 
Can He mean that my life should be a bondage, 
— a perpetual struggle between inclination and 
duty? Rather let me believe that, in my sim- 
plicity, I have misunderstood the nature of the 
prohibition ; and very certainly He does not mean 
that an action in itself of so little consequence 
should be followed by such evil results as those 
which I have apprehended. How, in fact, can I 
so well manifest my confidence in His goodness, 
my gratitude for the many prerogatives with 
which His royal munificence has endowed me ; 
how so well my contentment with His authority, — 
as by shaking off the bondage of a fearful spirit, 
and indulging that desire for an earth-born hap- 
piness, which is a part of my nature, not accord- 
ing to any statute of limitations, but in the 
exercise of a free intelligence? 

Let the catastrophe, in that case, be our warn- 
ing. Yielding to the tempter, the presence of 
God immediately departed from the soul. Fallen 



94 SERMONS. 

into a law relation, God has become the subject 
of her settled distrust. But still true to the orig- 
inal law of finding her happiness in loving, noth- 
ing remains now but for the soul to make the 
most of that which is offered, in a love relation, 
or, properly speaking, a lust relation, with that 
inferior and transitory good by which she was 
seduced from her pristine purity. 

This is the condition of the soul at present. 
Once the joy of the Creator's bosom, and the 
image of His perfection, she is now led captive 
by the arts of the great seducer. Her affections, 
so ennobled originally by their conscious alliance 
with the All-Good and the All-Fair, and so happy 
in the prospect of an interminable bloom, are now 
reduced to the necessity of ever pursuing an illu- 
sion, — a known illusion, for the most part, — or 
at once yielding to despair. In a word, if we 
may credit the statements of inspiration, and be 
allowed to draw an illustration from some of its 
various imagery, the difference between the 
actual condition of the soul, and that in which 
it stood when it first came from the hand of 
its Creator, — or rather from His bosom, for 
are we not His offspring? — is just the differ- 
ence between a perfectly filial youth, to whom 
his father might have said, "Son, thou art ever 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON 



95 



with me, and all that I have is thine ; " and 
that same youth, when, at another period of his 
history, he would fain have filled his belly with 
the husks which the swine did eat ; or, to go a 
degree lower, between the woman, crowned with 
the honors and exulting in the joys of the new- 
made bride, and the same woman lost to the glory 
and the peace of innocence. 

The gospel is the instrumentality by which 
this condition is reversed ; by which the whole 
evil of the fall is repaired ; by which the power 
of a seducing world is entirely broken, and the 
soul reunited in its ancient bonds to her true hus- 
band. 

And what is the gospel ? When the new Jeru- 
salem shall come down out of heaven, prepared 
as a bride adorned for her husband, and it shall 
be asked, *Who are these that are arrayed in 
white robes, and whence come they?" the re- 
sponse shall be, "These are they which came out 
of great tribulation, and have washed their robes 
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." 
Though a multitude which no man can number, 
with one voice they ascribe the purity which fits 
them for the heavenly bridal, to the Lamb that 
was slain. In the symphony which bursts from 
the full communion of the blessed, "Worthy is 



96 SERMONS. 

the Lamb that was slain," we have the answer 
to the question, What is the gospel? It is simply 
the doctrine of expiation and of sanctification by 
the blood of Jesus. To describe the inward pro- 
cess by which this doctrine restores the soul to 
purity and to heaven, shall be the object of our 
further remarks. 

The first thing that is done on the part of God, 
in the execution of His gracious purpose, is to 
send a message to the soul, announcing that the 
breach is not past healing ; that a reconciliation is 
possible, the first condition of which is, that she 
must forsake the world immediately, and return 
to her true husband. So sincere, so anxious, we 
may say, is His desire for the soul's return, that, 
not content with despatching a single message, He 
sends her line upon line, servant after servant, 
rising up early and sending them, saying, Return 
from your evil ways. Some of these servants, in 
fact, He has organized into a standing ministry, 
— well called a ministry of reconciliation, — whose 
whole business it is to wait upon the soul through 
all the period of her probation, to argue with her, 
endeavoring to convince her what a folly she has 
committed, what a delusion to make a God of this 
poor world ; to remind her of the happy and hon- 
orable state from which she has fallen, and which 



TEE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 97 

she may yet recover, — for they are directed al- 
ways to conclude with the assurance that, notwith- 
standing all her folly and all her guilt, the door 
to a reunion is yet open, and will be until a cer- 
tain hour : an hour, the date of which not being 
precisely fixed, the soul is at liberty to consider as 
either near or distant. But, to give the greater 
force to the language of entreaty, she is distinctly 
forewarned that there is an hour which fixes the 
limit of her Lord's forbearance, and of her proba- 
tion, — an hour beyond which the world can no 
longer hold her, nor she the world, when at mid- 
night a cry shall be heard, Behold, the bridegroom 
cometh ! Of the manner in which this message is 
received by the many who are called, it is not our 
business, at present, to speak. Only to observe, in 
passing, that they make light of it, and go their 
ways, — one to his farm, another to his merchan- 
dise. For no great pleasure here upon the earth, 
— for the enjoyment of a landed estate, a property 
already attained, or in the hope of acquiring such 
a property by success in merchandise, — they de- 
spise the joy of an everlasting bridal, and the 
glory of an eternal crown. The man who, for such 
a dream as a title in heaven, would sacrifice, or 
even hazard, any worldly possession, whilst re- 
taining ever so little capacity for holding and 

7 



98 SERMONS. 

enjoying it, by the general voice is pronounced a 
fool. He who, in his zeal for such a faith, dares 
to encounter the world's persecution, makes for 
himself the reputation of a fanatic. The general 
effect of the message upon the wanton soul is to 
increase her wantonness. The whole comfort 
which she takes from it, is that which is contained 
in the intimation that her lord delayeth his com- 
ing. How active is her fancy in stretching that 
period to its utmost conceivable limit ! how exu- 
berant in filling it with images of worldly bliss, 
with scenes which derive all their enchantment 
from the absence of her Lord, and want nothing 
to make it a perfect heaven but the assurance 
that He will never come to interrupt her pleasure ! 
But of these it is not our business, at present, to 
speak. 

It is of those whose better sensibilities have been 
awakened ; of those in whom the doctrine of the 
message, corresponding with a soul-felt want, 
becomes an inward call which they cannot resist, 
which they would fain obey. 

What is that want? It begins in a sense of the 
unsatisfying nature of worldly good ; in a dim ap- 
prehension that the soul, in seeking it, is but wan- 
dering more and more from its highest sphere, and 
that substantial happiness can only be obtained by 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 99 

turning back and seeking first, reconciliation with 
God. Under this conviction she turns back. But 
soon she meets an invincible difficulty in the law 
relation, under which she has fallen ; a difficulty of 
which she has but little consciousness, while still 
blinded bv the attractions of the world, and de- 
ceived by its fair promises. But let the world be- 
come dark, entirely dark; let that be fulfilled in 
the soul which is described by the prophets : " She 
weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on 
her cheeks : among all her lovers she hath none to 
comfort her : all her friends have dealt treacher- 
ously with her, they are become her enemies," — 
then shall she say, "I will go and return to my 
first husband, for then it was better w T ith me than 
now;" that is, her vital union with the world 
being broken, let her seek a similar union with 
the God she has forsaken, and in that law rela- 
tion, which had hitherto been only a little irk- 
some, by no means very painful or burthensome, 
she will find the root of all her misery. 

This soul may have turned back a hundred 
times ; and a hundred times, from not meeting the 
response which she expected, she has been forced 
to seek her happiness again in the embrace of the 
world. The cause of these disappointments has 
been her supposing that God still stood to her in 



IOO SERMONS. 

a law relation, — any other she was incapable of 
conceiving ; that, God being angry with her for 
her worldly dalliances, she could win back His 
favor only by her strenuous repentances, by her 
legal efforts to obey His requirements. The result 
of all these efforts has been, that, receiving no sign 
of the Divine acceptance, no inward testimony 
that God is reconciled, her bondage to the world 
is as fixed as ever. Do what she may, there 
always remains a deep, unconquerable misgiving 
as to the heart of the offended party. The reason 
is obvious. The heart has departed from its 
rightful husband ; and, if infidelity, even in hu- 
man relations, is esteemed a crime of such a 
nature that a reparation can scarcely ever be 
made for it, what wanderer from God, however 
he may long to return or strive to return, can 
ever hope for the smallest expression of that 
heart-felt kindness which is only the blissful re- 
ward of purity? 

We are now prepared to describe the process 
by which the gospel is effectual to this purpose. 
Great as the difficulties are which prevent the 
soul's return to God, arising from her inveterate 
worldliness, those which eternal morality inter- 
posed to prevent God's returning to her, were of 
a far more serious character. It is very conceivable 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. IOI 

that a man might have so much love for a ruined 
wife, that he would die to recover her to happi- 
ness, who yet could not bear the thought of a re- 
union with her, for the reason, that such a meas- 
ure, without exalting her, except in an outward 
way, would but degrade him to her own level. 
Such, according to the Christian scheme, was 
God's love to the sinning soul, that, in the person 
of His Son, He did die ; but, in so doing, He not 
only gave an expression to His love, which is but 
one part of the meaning of the atonement, but He 
made it a moral thing, — moral on both sides, — 
that the law relation should be entirely buried, 
and the love relation immediately revived. This 
is the gospel. The doctrine which contains as 
in a seed the whole vitality of revealed religion, 
— the doctrine which distinguishes the gospel of 
God from every ethical system of rational or 
human origin, — is simply the doctrine of ex- 
piation by the blood of Jesus, — the doctrine 
of the death of the law relation which had 
existed between God and man, and of its re- 
organization between God and his co-equal 
Son, who, assuming humanity, has fulfilled 
all its responsibilities, both of suffering as an 
expiation for transgression, and of obedience as 
a title to unchanging respect and favor. That 



102 SEEMONS. 

gospel which meets the soul-felt want of universal 
humanity, which awakens all its hopes and in- 
spires all its efforts, is contained essentially in 
this doctrine, — that sinners of mankind are jus- 
tified, that is regarded and treated as righteous, 
are not merely delivered from condemnation, but 
receive a full legal title to glorification, not in 
virtue of their own personal righteousness, but in 
virtue of the righteousness of another, the whole 
benefit of which they obtain by simply trusting 
it. " But to him that worketh not, but believeth 
on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is 
counted for righteousness," and obtains for him, 
through the satisfaction which has been rendered 
to the Lord by another, a full title, and what 
Adam had not in Paradise, a sure and indefeasi- 
ble title to all the benefits which are due to a per- 
fect legal or personal obedience. 

I am far from saying, that it is under this 
full conception of the nature of the gospel, that 
the few who are chosen find their encourage- 
ment to begin the work of salvation. I have 
stated the truth in all its fulness, as it is af- 
firmed in the Scriptures and confirmed by ma- 
ture experience. But a spark of it is enough to 
light the lamp of hope in many a soul, and to in- 
itiate a preparation for meeting the Bridegroom. 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SOX. 103 

Enough that the title to Heaven has been se- 
cured : it only remains to acquire the fitness for 
it. What is that fitness? What can it be but 
sanctilication? We proceed to show that sanc- 
tification, alike with justification, — the fitness for 
Heaven as well as the title to it, — comes only 
through the blood of the Lamb. The first use 
of the term "sanctify" which occurs in the Scrip- 
tures, and which has reference to persons, is 
where it is commanded that the first-born of the 
Israelites in Egypt should be sanctified, separated 
from the service of their parents, and from all 
worldly employments, and consecrated to the 
peculiar service of Jehovah, — that is, sanctified. 
In process of time, this order was commuted ; and 
in place of the first-born of the whole nation, one 
of its tribes, the tribe of Levi, was accepted as a 
substitute. The occasion and manner of that 
sanctification were this : God in judgment had re- 
solved upon the destruction of all the first-born of 
the Egyptians. But, meaning to spare the first- 
born of the Israelites, who were mingled with the 
Egyptians, He directed that a lamb should be 
slain in every family, and that the blood of this 
lamb should be sprinkled with a bunch of hyssop 
on the lintel and door-posts of every Israelite's 
house, that when the angel of the Lord passed 



104 SERMONS. 

through the land to smite the Egyptians, this 
sign might be a protection to those whom it was 
intended to spare. Those who were thus sym- 
bolically redeemed by blood, were ordered to be 
sanctified or to be considered holy unto the Lord. 

Every one sees that this must have been the 
symbol of a higher redemption and a higher 
sanctification. The apostle Paul, referring to 
the whole Jewish ritual, of which this was but 
the beginning, and in which every thing was 
purified by blood, has this expression : " For 
if the blood of bulls and of goats sanctifieth to 
the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall 
the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal 
Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, purge 
your conscience from dead works (that is, from 
law works, works which have no life in them), to 
serve the living God ; " from which, without any 
further citations (though the number of cor- 
roborating testimonies is unlimited), we gather 
this proposition, — that sanctification, like justifi- 
cation, is essentially the effect of faith in the 
great sacrifice. 

The blood of Christ trusted in, has a twofold 
effect, — an effect upon the mind of God toward 
us, and an effect upon our minds toward Him. 
The effect of faith upon the mind of God toward 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 105 

us, we call Justification, — its effect upon our 
minds toward Him, we call Sanctification. 

Sanctification, then, under the New Testament, 
is that inward and voluntary devotion of a soul 
to God, to which it is naturally and necessarily 
prompted by the apprehension of God's love to a 
sinful world, — of which the atonement of Christ 
is both the expression and the justification. This 
love, self-appropriated (which is Faith), redeem- 
ing the soul from the curse of a law relation, 
breaks the power both of earth and hell, re- 
deems it to the love and service of God. Just in 
so far as a soul is conscious of a deliverance from 
the curse of the law relation, through the inter- 
vention of that Sacrifice, it sanctifies itself, — 
consecrates itself to God. 

Sanctification is thus the natural and necessary 
effect of a free justification ; growing out of it, just 
as the branches of a living vine grow out of their 
parent stock. From the very nature of our rela- 
tions to God, a soul that has sinned cannot re- 
turn, cannot put forth the first act of acceptable 
obedience until the power of a free justification 
has been felt in the conscience ; and vice versa, 
from the moment that that power begins to oper- 
ate in the conscience, according to the strength 
of assurance which is thus imparted, the whole 
man is drawn back to holiness. 



106 SERMONS. 

And now, let us test this principle by a direct 
application. Tell me, my friends, what is it 
which those hearts of yours, even though many 
of you are yet so young, have been seeking for 
long years, and are seeking still, and must seek 
for ever? Do you say, as with more or less qual- 
ification all of you will have to say, the love of 
creatures? But, if that be true, is it not made 
true mainly by the fact, that the offer of a 
higher fellowship has never been distinctly made 
to you, so distinctly that you could fully ap- 
propriate and entirely depend upon it ? You 
have had the idea, perhaps, that the fellowship 
which God offers you in the gospel is bur- 
thened with conditions. But suppose you could 
be persuaded that this was an entire miscon- 
ception ; that the primary requirement of the 
gospel is not that you should love Him, but that 
you should repose, with unchanging confidence, 
on the assurance of His love to you : no love or 
service being desired or expected of you but such 
as this faith will spontaneously generate, the real 
demand being for faith, and for faith alone, — 
faith in His love under all possible conditions? 
Tell me, farther, are you not conscious that your 
deepest want is not of affection merely, but of 
affection combined with purity, — the love of a 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 107 

higher nature, but of a nature which, in loving, 
will purify and exalt you ? It is not peace simply 
that you seek, but peace and purification. By 
a necessity which no power of will can change, 
your heart — having been made distrustful by sin 
of the only Being whose love can satisfy you — 
is ever tempted to seek a substitute in visions of 
earthly bliss, which, however warmly you pursue, 
you know you can never embrace. Were it but 
possible that that higher nature, without any 
degradation to itself, could embrace you just as 
you are, and hold you in its embrace till you were 
completely purified ! Oh, could the All-Good and 
the All-Fair but give you the assurance that He 
would descend to you in your unhappy state, and 
love you with a love that should never change ! 
Not content with a verbal assurance of this by 
the mouth of a messenger, should He come Him- 
self in the likeness of your own sinful flesh, and, 
first, to remove that greatest hindrance to an en- 
trance into the Holiest, which arises from an 
ever-accusing conscience, should He make His 
own soul an expiatory offering for all your sin, past 
and future, in this respect, by that one offering 
perfecting you for ever, — tell me, I say, — if 
these views, which you must perceive contain the 
quintessence of the gospel, instead of being mere 



108 SERMONS. 

theory, were to become a vital reality, which 
they will become, exactly in proportion as you 
act upon them, — could you refrain from saying, 
with the fallen Peter, "Thou, who knowest all 
things, knowest that I love Thee "? Depend upon 
it, that this susceptibility to the claims of Christ 
upon our supreme affection, which is always the 
consequence of a free justification, is the kernel 
of the whole matter. Sanctification is nothing else 
but the development of this germ, the perfecting 
of this love. And that is the end of our life-trial, 
— a trial upon which we have no time to dwell, 
but upon which, in passing, we must make this 
single remark, defining the difference between it 
and the trial of our original humanity; viz., that 
the trial of our original humanity was a trial for 
justification, — a trial for a title. In our case, 
on the contrary, this title is already secure. 
The title to justification and all its blessings, 
the title to a complete salvation, has been se- 
cured by the trials of Incarnate love. Our trial 
is merely the method which Divine wisdom 
has ordained for developing the principle of 
trust, the seed of sanctification, — a trial which 
continues through our whole life, and, therefore, 
it is said, " These are they which have come out 
of great tribulation." But of the nature of this 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. 109 

trial we have not time, at present, to speak. Let 
us conclude, then, with a view of its glorious 
issue. Blessed are they which shall enter into 
the marriage-supper of the Lamb ! 

And to get a proper conception of the scene 
which shall then be unfolded, we must again 
throw our thoughts back to the condition of the 
soul when it first came from the hand of its 
Creator ; for its recovery to that state is substan- 
tially the issue of the whole experience. What 
are all the deeper troubles of the soul, what its 
profoundest prayers, but a sighing to recover the 
state into which it was originally born, and for 
which it was constitutionally made ? The univer- 
sal instinct teaches us that we were made for 
love. The great attraction of our fallen state is 
the love of the creature, and to this we cleave 
because we know of nothing that is better. But 
a Christian has risen to the idea that it is not in 
all creatures to give him this enjoyment, in such 
sufficiency and such purity as his nature requires. 
This can be found only in the love of God, — a 
love deep as the ocean, which cannot be ex- 
hausted, and pure as the heavens, which nothing 
can defile. 

This was the happiness of the soul on the day 
of its creation. 



IIO SERMONS. 

But all this has been lost by her fall. By a 
gulf which apparently could never be passed, by 
a law which apparently could never be changed, 
the victim was separated from the joy of inno- 
cence. By the just judgment of heaven, the 
soul, originally divine, the joy of its Creator's 
bosom and the image of His perfection, seduced 
from her first allegiance, was abandoned to the 
power of her destroyer, until another Being — 
sometimes called the Son of God, because He is 
divine, and sometimes the Son of Man, because 
He appeared in our nature — came as her de- 
liverer ; by His voluntary sacrifice propitiating for 
her the powers of heaven, and by the infusion of 
His own Spirit gradually reproducing her origi- 
nal purity. But her present condition is one 
often of the deepest trial : as a poor widow, op- 
pressed by her adversary ; as a woman forsaken 
and grieved in spirit; as a wife of youth, who 
has experienced the bitterest of human reverses, 
she is ever looking to heaven for consolation, and 
there she finds it in the assurance which the gos- 
pel gives her, in the deep assurance that her 
Maker is her husband, who though, for the trial of 
her constancy, often seeming to forget her during 
the small moment of her wanderings upon earth, 
will yet rejoice over her with a bridegroom's joy, 



THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING'S SON. Ill 

clothing her with the garments of salvation as the 
bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and 
as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels. New 
honors, unknown to primal innocence, await the 
soul which shall be found faithful at the last 
advent. Not only shall the past be no more re- 
membered, not only shall there be a recovery of 
the peace and purity of paradise, but a voice from 
the Throne declares, Behold, I make all things 
new ! A new name, which the mouth of the 
Lord shall name ; a new attire, not merely of 
bridal beauty, but of queenly splendor ; an inher- 
itance which can never be defiled, and a glory 
which can never fade, — these are the rewards of 
suffering obedience w r hich shall be given when 
the Bridegroom cometh. 

Let us then gird up the loins of our mind, and 
hope unto the end for the grace that shall be 
brought unto us at the final revelation, when the 
love and fidelity of our heavenly Bridegroom, 
about which we shall always be living in some 
jealousy here, shall be vindicated by the fulfilment 
of His dearest engagements ; when the desire for 
us, which first brought Him from His royal 
abode, shall be fully satisfied by making us par- 
takers of His royalty. 

When, though we have been living here in 



112 SERMONS. 

such comparative wretchedness, sighing gener- 
ally under the -sense of un worthiness and the fear 
of being forsaken, we shall find, to our eternal won- 
der, that, amidst all our woes and wanderings on 
earth, His love has never for a moment forgotten 
us ; and that now, in the presence of the Ancient 
of Days, while thousands of thousands are minis- 
tering unto Him, and ten thousand times ten thou- 
sand are standing around Him, His chief delight 
is not in the praises of the seraphim, but in the 
joy of His mystic bride, as above earth's throes 
she stands in her white robe, and waves her ever- 
blooming palm. 



II. 

THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 

" He that believetk not shall be damned." — Mark xvi. 16. 

L^OR a reason which might be given, the word 
damnation, or any other word expressing the 
same idea, — the word hell, for example, — oc- 
curs very seldom in the preaching or writings of 
the apostles, but very frequently in the discourses 
of our Lord. It is generally true, that threaten- 
ings, even Divine threatenings, lose much of their 
force by frequent repetition. But coming from 
one who was not only inspired to utter, but com- 
missioned to execute them, and from one of whom 
all that we know forbids the presumption that He 
could have any pleasure in being the messenger 
of wrath, — for He came not to condemn the 
world, but to save it, — coming from such a one, 
the frequency of their repetition detracts nothing 
from their solemnity. 

And what a certainty it attaches to the doctrine 

of a future and a fearful retribution, that we have 

8 



114 SERMONS. 

it attested to us by such an authority ; that, 
from lips so gracious, there should have fallen 
such an expression as the one contained in the 
text, and this but one of many to the same 
purpose. 

Of the nature of this retribution it is not our 
purpose, at present, to speak. The object of our 
discourse is to explain the sin which provokes it, 
— the sin, rather, of which damnation is the ne- 
cessary consequence. It appears, not only from 
the text, but from many other passages of our 
Lord's discourses, that damnation is the special 
penalty of unbelief; not of sin in general, or of 
sin in any other of its various forms, but of unbe- 
lief, simply and exclusively. It belongs to the 
pith of Christianity as first promulged by its 
Great Teacher, that only he who believeth not 
shall be damned. 

What, then, is unbelief? and, particularly, 
whence arises its peculiar guilt? To answer this 
question shall be the object of our discourse. We 
shall consider, — 

ist, What is unbelief, as distinguished from sin 
in general? 

2d, What is its radical and universal cause? 

3d, How is it actually developed? 

First, then, what is unbelief as distinguished 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 115 

from sin in general, and which makes it what sin 
in general is not, — inevitably damning? It will 
appear incidentally in the course of our remarks, 
that unbelief is sin in its strongest and most ma- 
lignant expression ; and, therefore, that it specially 
deserves damnation. And yet this is not the 
ground on which it actually incurs it. 

No sinner shall ever be damned simply on 
account of the enormity of his guilt, for the pro- 
visions of the gospel are just as adequate to the 
pardon of the greatest as of the least offences. 
What makes unbelief, as distinguished from sin 
in general, inevitably fatal, is the position in 
which it puts the sinner w r ith respect to the pro- 
visions of salvation, — a position in which they 
cannot reach him, and of course cannot save 
him. Whilst, therefore, men are condemned 
simply on the ground of unbelief, it is not, how- 
ever, because unbelief is a sin above other sins, 
— though it is so, as we shall see, — but because 
by its very nature it is antagonistic to God's 
method of salvation. 

Let me give an illustration which may show, 
in a popular though imperfect manner, the rela- 
tion which unbelief bears to the final penalty. 
There was a rebellion going on for some years 
against the government of a country. How 



Il6 SERMONS. 

often, while this contest was waging, did the gov- 
ernment say to the rebels, " If you will only lay 
down your arms, and return to your duty as good 
subjects, you shall have all the rights again, — 
all the just rights which have been forfeited by 
rebellion " ! But, instead of laying down their 
arms, they only cast contempt upon the offer : and 
you see, at once, that it was not their past rebel- 
lion, wicked as that may have been, but simply 
the manner in which they treated the overture, 
which made their restoration impossible. Not 
any spirit of vengeance on the part of the gov- 
ernment, but their own madness and folly, made 
their destruction unavoidable. 

Sin is rebellion against the government of 
heaven. The light of conscience in every indi- 
vidual of the race testifies that he is a party in 
this rebellion. But light has come into the world 
from another quarter; not from conscience, but 
direct from the throne, declaring God's purpose 
and method of salvation, — of which method the 
distinctive, and in fact the all-comprehensive, feat- 
ure is expressed by the term "grace." So far as 
God's disposition is concerned, salvation from all 
the consequences of sin may be obtained without 
the slightest sacrifice from the party needing it. 
God Himself has provided the sacrifice w T hich 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 1 17 

enables Him to offer salvation freely. But what 
is the spirit with which men receive this offer? 
With one consent, they agree to treat it as if it 
were a fiction. They make light of it. This is 
what is meant by unbelief, very properly so 
called, because unbelief only can explain such 
conduct. It is inconceivable that men could thus 
treat an overture of mercy, if they really believed 
themselves the hell-deserving sinners which the 
overture assumes them to be. It is because they 
do not believe the first principle on which the 
overture rests, — viz., the atrocity of sin, an un- 
belief which, as we shall show hereafter, is just 
as wilful, and even more damnable, than the 
rebellion itself, — that they act, naturally enough, 
as if it were all a fiction ; some spurning it 
as though it were utterly contemptible ; others 
affecting a degree of moderation, merely neglect- 
ing it. But, in such a case, neglect is contempt. 
Mercy, not embraced with the whole heart, is 
mercy despised. And, however to our eye unbe- 
lief may appear to have various shades or de- 
grees of malignity, not so to the eye of Him from 
whom the overture comes. It has cost Him too 
much to make it, to allow but one feeling in His 
mind, and that, a feeling of unmeasured indigna- 
tion toward every soul of man which refuses to 



Il8 SERMONS. 

embrace it. Eternal love, no less than eternal 
justice, will be avenged at last in the perdition, 
without remedy, of every soul upon which shall 
rest the guilt of unbelief, — a sin of more crim- 
son dye in the sight of heaven than all the crimes 
denounced in the decalogue ; and yet of so little 
account in the eye of the guilty party, that 
scarcely, in one of a thousand, every one of them 
red with the blood of the Son of God, is its crim- 
inality, much less its peculiar criminality, even a 
matter of suspicion. 

But when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed 
from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming 
fire, taking vengeance on them that know not 
God, and obey not the gospel, who shall be pun- 
ished with everlasting destruction from the pres- 
ence of the Lord, and from the glory of His 
power ; when He shall come to be glorified in 
His saints, and admired in all them that believe ; 
when every eye shall see Him, and they, also, 
which pierced Him, and all the kindreds of the 
earth shall wail because of Him, — then the guilt 
of unbelief shall be felt in the woe-stricken con- 
science to be all which the oracles of heaven 
had declared it; viz., the guilt of making God 
a liar, and of trampling under foot the blood of 
His Son. 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 119 

We come now to the second question. Having 
shown what it is in unbelief that distinguishes it 
from sin in general, — the latter being simply a 
rebellion against the government of heaven, the 
other rebellion spurning reconciliation, — we in- 
quire, secondly, what is its radical cause, — the 
cause which explains its universality and its 
power, its stupendous power over such a vast 
proportion of the race. 

It will appear, hereafter, that unbelief, as to its 
nature, is a delusion of the understanding, but a 
wilful delusion, a chosen delusion. Yet no one 
ever chooses a delusion except under the pressure 
of some sad necessity, some extreme exigency. 
What that exigency is, which has occurred to 
fallen man in his relations with the government 
of heaven, — an exigency which is felt less or 
more by every individual to whom the overture 
comes, and which impels him to rush, for a mo- 
mentary relief, into a wilful delusion, — that exi- 
gency I now propose to describe as the real and 
radical cause of all unbelief. 

But, to do this with clearness, we must go a 
little further than we have yet done into the origi- 
nal controversy. Let us endeavor, then, to make 
a clear statement of the whole issue between the 
soul and God. 



120 SERMONS. 

It is the doctrine of the Scriptures, that the 
carnal mind, or the mind previous to its spirit- 
ual renovation, is enmity against God. For a 
particular reason, "it is not subject to the law 
of God, neither indeed can be." From a prin- 
ciple rooted in the heart, every individual of 
the race is not, and until the ruling affection of 
his nature is changed cannot be, subject to the 
law of God. It being our object to make a clear 
statement of this tremendous issue, it may be well, 
in passing, to show what the issue is not; and I 
observe, first, that there is no hostility in the mind 
to God, as He is revealed in the laws of the 
natural universe. The goodness of these laws 
we never question. The sufferings which arise 
from an occasional anomaly in the manner of 
their working are so far outweighed and out- 
numbered by the blessings perpetually flowing 
from their regular operation, that no reasonable 
being ever thinks of the Author of Nature with 
any ambiguity of sentiment. For, although this 
natural constitution of ours is found to contain 
the seeds of pain, disease, and death, yet, when 
we distinguish between those pains and diseases 
which are purely natural, and which cannot be 
avoided, and those which are the effects of mad- 
ness and folly, — between those evils which flow 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 121 

directly from the laws of nature, and those which 
arise from the wicked abuse of these laws, — 
when, with this distinction in view, we consider 
how light and transient are all the pains of the 
present life, in comparison with the sum of its 
enjoyments ; and then, as to death ; when we re- 
flect that there is nothing in this natural revela- 
tion which forbids the hope of a still happier 
existence hereafter, — no prospect of a future reck- 
oning which should abate, in the least, our pres- 
ent satisfaction, with so much to enjoy and so 
little to apprehend ; — we see what reason there is 
that the soul should rejoice in nature, and cleave 
to the Author of nature as the child cleaves to 
the breast of its mother. In fact, the love which 
is inspired for God, as He is presented in these 
revelations, is so general, and often so impas- 
sioned, that, under the direction of another prin- 
ciple, which is wholly evil, it tends, as much as 
any other cause, to conceal from the soul its real 
character and the real issue between itself and 
heaven. 

Nor, secondly, in charging the soul with enmity 
against God, and especially against the law of 
God, is it meant that men in general are hostile 
to the moral law, as contained in the ten com- 
mandments. 



122 SERMONS. 

There is nothing in these, in any or in the 
whole of them, which affronts the sensibilities of 
the race. All of them, on the contrary, are in 
such happy accordance with the interests of man 
as a social being, that although under special 
temptations they are often violated, yet none 
but the most stupid or hardened ever think of 
impugning their beneficence. They may be 
regarded in fact as the teachings of nature re- 
affirmed with a Divine sanction, and made the 
basis of the civil and social economy of the 
chosen nation of antiquity, from which they have 
been copied, not at all on account of their relig- 
ious contents, but entirely because of their benefi- 
cent bearing upon the moral and social interests 
of the race, into the civil constitution of Christen- 
dom. And that these ten commandments are 
outwardly so generally regarded, and often so 
well regarded, under the instigation of self-love, 
is another of the causes which tend to disguise 
the real issue between the soul and its Maker. 

What, then, is the law to which the carnal mind 
is not and, remaining carnal, cannot be subject? 
We must look for it in a wider view of the soul's 
relations to God, than is included within the 
limits of time and nature. It is the law of the 
moral universe, — a law which embraces not 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 123 

man only, but the highest orders of creation. 
Whether they be thrones or dominions, princi- 
palities or powers, they can be subject to no 
higher responsibilities than those which result 
from a creation in the Divine likeness, — a dig- 
nity which belongs equally to man. For creat- 
ures made in the Divine image, what law can 
there be but the Divine example? The least that 
God can require of beings made like Himself is, 
that they should act like Himself; that they 
should be governed in all their actions by the 
same principle which forms the law of His own 
conduct, and peculiarly of His conduct toward 
them. The law of the Divine conduct is love, — 
eminently so with respect to the moral universe ; 
and this is the law which binds every member 
of that universe, both in his relations to the rest, 
and to the Supreme Ruler. Our concern at 
present is with the requirements of this law upon 
man. Endowed with instincts just as strong as 
those of the lower creatures, though immeasur- 
ably finer and more complex, and, through 
these, with a capacity for self-enjoyment to which 
there is scarcely a limit, he is endowed also with 
a power of controlling these instincts, even 
self-love, the most radical of them, in the inter- 
ests of a love which is universal. Thus a foun- 



124 SFMMONS. 

dation is laid for the virtue of Benevolence. Not 
from any expectation of reward, not from the 
belief that others will do in like manner to him 
(with good reason he may have the contrary 
belief), but hoping for nothing again, and in op- 
position to every instinct of his selfish nature, — 
to the love of property, to the love of pleasure, to 
the love of admiration, to the love of kindred, to 
the love of life, to the love of self in short, in all 
its manifold aspects, — a man may make himself an 
utter sacrifice for the benefit of his fellows, — not 
merely for the good, but even for the unthankful 
and the evil. Under the influence of Christianity, 
that sacrifice has been made to the full extent of 
this description, thousands of times, — if it should 
be called a sacrifice, — for it may be questioned 
whether the sense of duty which impels to it is 
any stronger than the sense of pleasure which 
accompanies it. And between them both, after 
it is all done, the man who has done it may say, 
without the slightest affectation, "I am but an un- 
profitable servant ; for I have done only what it 
was my duty to do." Such is the compass of the 
moral capabilities of human nature, with refer- 
ence only to the creature. And if a man may 
make so little account of the strongest instincts 
of his nature, if he may make self a perfect 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 1 25 

sacrifice, simply from a sense of right or of duty ; 
if he may do this in the interest of his fellow, his 
equal ; if he may do it in behalf of the most 
worthless of his species ; if he may do it in the 
interest of his enemy ; in short, if he may do it 
in a case which presents no claim whatever, and 
no possibility of recompense, — of what an un- 
measurable enlargement must this sentiment be 
susceptible, when the object of it is the Infinite 
God, the personal embodiment of absolute Per- 
fection ! 

This is the compass of man's moral capabilities 
with respect to his Creator; and this is what 
Heaven demands in its primal law. The com- 
plete subjugation of the self-principle to the be- 
hests, not of authority, but of Supreme goodness, 
— this is the demand of the primal law. ^ 

The demand of entire self-abnegation, made 
in the original law, furnished the occasion for 
the rebellion. The same demand still insisted 
on, even in the terms of reconciliation, notwith- 
standing a wonderful abatement in man's favor, 
furnishes the present provocation to rush into the 
delusions of unbelief. 

What is that abatement? The briefest state- 
ment is all that our limits will allow. But this 
will be sufficient to present the whole issue as it 



126 SERMONS. 

now stands between earth and heaven, or between 
the soul and God. 

In a perfect government, the demands of law 
can never be relaxed. In human governments, 
where law is at best but a conventional thing, 
they may be, and often are, with the greatest 
advantage to the public good. But any laxity, 
in enforcing the demands of the Divine law, 
would be an incurable wound to the happiness of 
the universe. On the other hand, however, it 
would be a wound equally incurable to the honor 
of the Supreme Ruler, and especially of His wis- 
dom, if, on the occurrence of transgression, no 
way should appear of saving the offender from 
the law's penalty. For, suppose that all should 
fall, — and, being both free and fallible, that was 
clearly within the range of possibility, — where 
would be God's kingdom? what security for the 
perpetuity of His throne? Clearly, unless there 
was some way in which God could manifest His 
love to the fallen, — that is, some way by which 
He could recover the fallen, — Evil might yet 
prove stronger than God. This, undoubtedly, was 
the ambition and the expectation of Satan : " I will 
ascend into heaven ; I will exalt my throne above 
the stars of God ; I will ascend above the heights 
of the clouds ; I will be like the Most High." On 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 127 

what was this expectation grounded? Clearly on 
the belief so seemingly rational, so apparently ir- 
refragable, that God could not maintain His law 
consistently with grace to its violators : could not 
remain immaculately holy, and yet give full ex- 
pression to His hitherto supposed illimitable love. 
Such was the hope of the arch-apostate ; and it 
seems but rational to suppose that an apprehen- 
sion of this nature had begun to throw its shadow 
over the ranks of the unfallen. To demolish by 
one blow the hopes of the one, and the possible 
doubts of the other, to settle for ever the foun- 
dations of His throne, not merely, nor perhaps 
chiefly, to manifest the immensity of His love in 
His treatment of a fallen race, though doubtless 
that was one of His motives, — but to the intent 
that it might be known through the ages and 
through the hierarchies in heavenly places, that 
the wisdom of God was equal to any emergency, 
God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made 
under the law, to redeem them that were under 
the law. That the law has been more honored 
in the heavenly places since the Coequal of God 
stooped to be subject to it, than it would have 
been by the obedience of the first Adam and of 
all of his posterity ; that by His subjection to it 
and suffering under it, in their nature and in 



128 SERMONS. 

their stead, He has made it right that as many as 
He chooses to save should be absolved from their 
penal liabilities ; that His righteousness, con- 
sidered simply as a means of honoring the gov- 
ernment of Heaven, is worth more, deserves more, 
than the personal righteousness of all creatures, 

— these are the first principles of the oracles of 
God. And what is the result? — the result and 
the reward of this Infinite loyalty? 

The Father has given all things into His hands, 

— things in heaven, and things in earth, and 
things under the earth. The things which were 
once in the hands of law, in the hands of justice, 
are now given into the hands of love. To what 
end? That He should give eternal life ; that He 
should give it, so far as the honor of the gov 
ernment is concerned, without any conditions, to 
all who will receive it. Will you receive it? 
That is the only question. There lies the whole 
issue between the soul and God. 

All depends on the spirit of your mind. Whilst 
the mind is carnal, any terms which a holy God 
might propose, would be alike ungrateful; for 
any terms which God should propose, must strike 
at the root of your mortal disease, your aversion 
to His law. The design of the gospel is to re- 
kindle your original, your constitutional, sym- 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 1 29 

pathy with the law of God, which, you must 
know, is the ultimate condition of the happiness 
of your nature. For this purpose, it removes 
every obstacle arising from the past, and every 
fear connected with the future, — provided there 
is one thing, — a simple purpose of the heart, 
as simple as the opening of the eye to the light, 
— a real purpose of heart, under the pressure of 
these high encouragements, to seek after God, — 
a real purpose of self-crucifixion in the interests 
of a higher love. That one thing lacking, then 
follows the exigency to which I referred, and 
which I shall now describe, as the real radical 
cause of all unbelief. 

Not from the force of circumstances, not from 
any external necessity, but from a principle 
rooted in the heart, every individual of the race 
is an enemy to the government of Heaven. It 
is the enmity of sin to holiness. The overture 
asks him to lay aside his enmity, offers him 
pardon, and far more than pardon, if he does so, 
with the alternative of utter destruction in case 
of refusal, — utter destruction by the law of his 
own constitution. What shall he do? For 
here, you will observe, that sin has not only 
made a schism between earth and heaven, but 
it has made a schism in the soul itself. 

9 



I30 SERMONS. 

If the will and affections are entirely alienated, 
the understanding and conscience for a time at 
least retain their fidelity. Hence the dilemma. 
What shall he do? It is a government which he 
hates, — to get entirely free from it is the motive 
of the revolt. There is no hope of a compro- 
mise. Amnesty for the past, but submission for 
the future ; submission to the very laws and re- 
strictions which in his heart he hates, — these are 
the only terms which the government can offer. 
The amnesty is well enough, but how can he 
heartily submit to the former government? 

On the other hand, however, how can he carry 
in his bosom the perpetual consciousness of being 
at enmity with Heaven? How can he endure for 
a single moment the horrible apparition of Divine 
vengeance, — made sure not merely by the 
threatening appended to the overture, but by a 
light which is prior to, and confirmatory of it, — 
a light in his own mind which testifies that the 
government is right, that the guilt of rebellion lies 
upon his soul, and that wrath is certainly impend- 
ing? How shall he act in such circumstances? 

Between these mutually opposing forces, hatred 
of the duty and dread of the penalty, as long as 
they are evenly balanced the full and final action 
of the soul in regard to the overture remains un- 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 131 

determined. Once rid of this thick drop of be- 
lieving terror which clogs the conscience, and 
the difficulty is passed. But how is he to get rid 
of it? It is just here that unbelief comes to his 
rescue. Pressed on two sides, — on one side by 
aversion to the government, which makes sub- 
mission inadmissible ; on the other, by the 
threatened penalty, which makes resistance most 
perilous, — the party in rebellion rushes for relief 
into a network of delusion, the contrivance of a 
common adversary, which, hiding for the present 
his tremendous danger, beguiles him at length 
into perdition, without remedy. 

But how is this practicable? Is a man's belief 
dependent on his will ? Can he believe what he 
chooses to believe? This brings us to our last 
question : How is unbelief practically developed ? 
in other words, What is unbelief, considered as a 
process of the mind? We have seen what it is 
as a process of the heart. But the heart cannot 
accomplish its purpose without the aid of a men- 
tal delusion. How is this delusion effected? 
Unbelief is an instance, the highest of its kind, of 
that very common fact in human history, that in 
any conflict between the understanding and the 
passions, if the conflict be protracted, means will 
be found, sooner or later, of reducing the better 



132 SERMONS. 

principle to a state of subserviency. The conflict 
in this case is between the deepest passion of 
human nature and the law of God, or the light 
from God which condemns it. The passion is 
susceptible of infinite variations as to form and 
expression, but its essence is self-pleasing, su- 
preme self-regard. 

This is, comprehensively, the sin of our nature, 
— the root of all other sins, and the citadel of 
their strength, — combining the power of a set- 
tled principle with the rage, when occasion de- 
mands it, of a furious passion. Domineering 
self-regard, this is the evil against which, as 
most opposite to His own nature, as well as de- 
structive to the order of the universe, the Holy 
One opposes His everlasting justice. From that 
justice, by an eternal necessity, there is but one 
way of escape; viz., by a change of nature, — by 
a moral renovation. For such a renovation a 
full provision is made in the gospel. I wish to 
show you how, by a wilful delusion, this provis- 
ion is made ineffectual. 

The all-absorbing fact, which the gospel re- 
veals, is the advent of a Being in our nature, 
who claims to be the Son of God, and the Saviour 
of mankind. It is said, Believe in Him, and you 
shall be saved. Believe in what? In the his- 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 13 3 

torical fact of His appearance in the flesh, of His 
humiliation and sacrifice? In the doctrine, that 
by this sacrifice He has rolled off the burthen of 
our sin, and restored us to fellowship with God? 
Of what significance is that fact to you, unless 
your sins are felt to be a burthen, which will 
crush you to hell, unless you are delivered? Bear 
in mind the vital connection which there must be 
between believing in Christ as a Saviour, and 
believing in your own ruin as a sinner. If you 
cannot see the atrocity of sin, and that you are 
the subject of it in all its atrocity, how can you 
attach any meaning to the agony of the Cross? 
Before a man can believe with the heart in the 
testimony of the Scriptures concerning Christ and 
salvation, he must believe with his conscience in 
the testimony of the same Scriptures concerning 
himself and damnation. Who is it that tells us 
of destroying soul and body in hell, — of the man 
who lifted up his eyes in hell, being in torment, 

— of the resurrection of damnation, — of the 
worm that never dies, and the fire that shall 
never be quenched, — of everlasting fire, pre- 
pared for the devil and his angels? and all this, 
if you will lay your mind open to the testimony, 
and especially the testimony of the Great Teacher, 

— all this, simply because they lived to please 
themselves. 



134 SERMONS. 

Here, then, is the point at which unbelief be- 
gins. You have no difficulty in accepting, how- 
ever illogically, the historical fact, that Jesus 
Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the 
world. The difficulty begins with those moral 
facts which underlie the historical and explain 
their necessity, — with those facts respecting the 
nature and desert of sin, which rest upon the 
authority of conscience, informed by revelation, 
and which are fundamental to the overture. To 
accept these, in connection with the historical, 
would be equivalent to a moral renovation. The 
acceptance of the other without these, i.e., of the 
historical without the moral, is simply a mental 
delusion, and a wilful delusion. For God has 
endowed you with a spiritual faculty, by which, 
if you will, the moral truth in the case may be 
just as clearly discerned as the historical. 

It is not to be imagined, my hearers, that our 
beneficent Creator, who has not given being even 
to the lowest animal, without endowing him with 
a self-preserving instinct, should have created an 
immortal being without giving him at least equal 
advantages. Having environed him with laws 
which cannot be transgressed without the saddest 
effects, He must have endowed him with an in- 
stinctive perception, both of the nature and the 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 135 

consequences of transgression, — not so instinc- 
tive as to supersede the exercise of reason, and 
the necessity of care and vigilance and energy ; 
but all-sufficient in the exercise of these qualities 
not only to have preserved his original purity, 
but all-sufficient still, in connection with the pro- 
visions of the gospel, to deliver him out of all his 
miseries. 

Therefore it is, that our Saviour has placed the 
condemnation of man upon this ground : <r This," 
says he, " is the condemnation, that light has 
come into the world, and men loved dark- 
ness rather than light, because their deeds were 
evil; for every one that doeth evil," — who is 
conscious of doing evil, — K hateth the light, and 
neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should 
be reproved." 

Unbelief, to describe it by a figure, is the 
result of simply closing the eye of the soul 
against the light which comes to it from God. It 
is assumed in this figure, that the soul has an 
organ, the use and office of which, in spiritual 
concerns, corresponds to that of the eye in the 
structure of the body. We call this the eye of 
the soul, because as in all its outward movements 
the body follows, and must follow, the guidance 
of the eye, so in all its spiritual movements the 



136 SERMONS. 

soul follows, and must follow, the guidance of 
the conscience. 

Let us pursue the illustration one step farther. 
Supposing a transparent atmosphere and an 
abundance ol light : the healthful and vigorous 
movement of the body under the guidance of the 
eye depends on a single and very simple con- 
dition ; viz., that the eye be open. This is the 
condition upon which hangs salvation, — the 
simple condition of keeping the eye open. Light 
has come into the world. Keep the eye open, 
and salvation will follow as a necessary conse- 
quence. Here lies the only difficulty. Every 
thing, my hearers, in the boundless eternity 
which lies before you, hangs upon this simple 
condition, — Cover not your sin; and, as it 
rises before you in all its enormity, cast yourself 
naked and helpless on the word of the Saviour, 
and persist in doing so to the jaws of Death, and 
you will find yourself in the arms of Mercy. 

Let me recapitulate and conclude. 

The carnal mind, we have seen, is enmity 
against God because of His moral government. 
To its apprehension, the only object of that gov- 
ernment is to support its own prerogative. Of 
course, such a government must be hateful. But 
need I say that that apprehension arises entirely 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 1 37 

from the consciousness of guilt? Remove that 
consciousness by a free pardon, and then see how 
the subject will appear. Who can believe that 
the Divine government is a despotism ? 

Looking at it in the light of a disinthralled 
understanding, is it not obvious that the govern- 
ment of Heaven must be just what every benign 
government on earth is, — viz., a provision, and 
the best which could be made for the happiness 
of its subjects ? By the government of Heaven 
is meant that provision which has been made by 
the Supreme Disposer, not primarily for the sup- 
port of His own prerogative, but primarily for the 
happiness of the myriads which His power had 
brought into being. Assuming the existence of 
an infinite, all-wise, and benevolent Creator, it is 
inconceivable that, as the Author of the universe, 
He should not have made some simple provision 
for its happiness. This provision is contained in 
the laws by which it is governed, simply and en- 
tirely in its system of legislation. If it had been 
the main purpose of this discourse, as it is cer- 
tainly a part of its purpose, to vindicate the 
beneficence of this system, we should have begun 
with a cursory view, at least, of that part of it in 
which, though of the least significance in itself, 
beneficence is manifest beyond the possibility of 



138 SERMONS. 

cavil. I mean the laws of the natural universe. 
And now, in conclusion, let me use an argument 
from those laws to abate, if it may not entirely 
remove, a general prejudice, which is felt by 
every unreconciled heart in contemplating the 
government of Heaven, — a prejudice which stands 
at the threshold of all our difficulties. It is fun- 
damental to a successful pursuit of salvation, that 
the understanding should possess a satisfactory 
conviction of the Divine benignity, including, of 
course, the idea of justice. 

But, in tracing the workings and windings of 
unbelief, we are soon brought to the conclusion 
that the last pillar, on which it rests for support, 
is a suspicion, — it cannot be called a conviction, 
for it relates to a matter upon which nothing can 
be logically established ; it can only proceed, 
therefore, from the coldness of the heart, — it finds, 
I say, its last refuge, the last hiding-place for its 
shame, in a cold suspicion, that, in the primary 
laws and arrangements of the moral universe, or 
of that part of the system which pertains to the 
government of free agents, the Supreme Disposer 
has acted with a degree of unfairness, not to call 
it malevolence, — that, in the constitution given 
to these agents, He has left, in the exercise of His 
sovereignty, a point of weakness which excuses 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 1 39 

at least, if it does not entirely justify, their subse- 
quent rebellion. 

I appeal to that light of reason which, blessed 
be its Author, still lingers in our apostate human- 
ity, to say how far it is probable that He, who 
has shown such a marvellous kindness in the con- 
stitution of our lower nature, should have been 
moved by any less in determining the laws of our 
immortal existence. Is it probable that He who 
fitted up this beautiful habitation for the tempo- 
rary residence of man, should have had any but 
the kindest thoughts in framing the constitution 
of that higher world, of which the present is but 
the vestibule ? 

I call upon the laws of nature to vindicate my 
God. 

Tell us, ye mute but mighty agencies in 
whose perfect equipoise, and whose exact revolu- 
tions, a foundation has been laid for the durability 
of this material system, at whose command ye 
were first marshalled to your spheres, and whose 
orders ye are constantly fulfilling? Tell us, ye 
inorganic elements of earth and air, from whose 
breath ye receive the virtue which impregnates 
the organized seed, and causes it to bring forth, 
in boundless profusion, a supply for the wants 
of the animal creation? Tell us whence that law 



I40 SERMONS. 

of the animal nature, by which, after appropriat- 
ing to its own use the riches of the vegetable 
kingdom, it is constrained, with so little reluctance, 
to submit to the rule, and to labor for the good of 
the rational? Above all, we call upon the ra- 
tional to answer w r ho established those laws of 
communication between the sentient principle 
within him, and the myriad objects of the outer 
universe, by which all that is good and glorious 
in the latter, becomes so easily his personal, we 
may say his patrimonial, possession. And those 
other laws, even finer, and pregnant with a treas- 
ure so much richer, by which mind communicates 
with mind and soul with soul, in an intercourse 
which, but for sin, would make earth the symbol 
and almost the synonyme of Heaven, who was the 
legislator here? Oh tell me, as you see the sun 
coming forth from his chamber, awaking in every 
living thing the consciousness of a fresh exist- 
ence, the birds filling the air with their melody, 
the valleys covered over with corn, and the flocks 
rejoicing on a thousand hills ; or, when sitting at 
your own fireside, where every heart is glowing 
with the raptures of life, your board spread with 
every gift of the season, and your loved ones like 
olive-plants encircling and adorning it; or when, 
at the close of a day of toil, the calm shades of 



THE GUILT OF UNBELIEF. 



I 4 I 



evening invite you to repose from care, and you 
think of the unnumbered blessings which the 
hours have scattered in their flight; how, at His 
rebuke, disease has fled from your dwelling, and 
the spirits of the air only minister to your good ; 
how His skies are ever dropping down upon us 
the riches of their beneficence, whilst the earth, 
like a vale of enchantment, spreads beneath our 
feet, — can you believe, — I appeal to that sense of 
honor which, with the light of reason, still lingers 
in our apostate humanity, — that He who meets 
us with such smiling tenderness in the morning 
of our being, whilst warning us by deeper intui- 
tions of the insufficiency of these earthly condi- 
tions for our highest development ; whilst teaching 
us to regard this earth, with all its pledges of a 
present affection, merely as the threshold of our 
being, merely as the school and the playground 
of our childhood ; while inciting us by sterner 
commands, as well as by loving encouragements, 
to seek our glory on the theatre of a distant eter- 
nity, — can you believe it, that, in the laws pertain- 
ing to that eternal existence, in the conditions 
prescribed for attaining this crown and consum- 
mation of our blessedness, He has shown Him- 
self only an unfeeling taskmaster? 



142 



SERMONS. 



What must be the doom of him, blessed with 
the light of all these revelations, who will have 
nothing to say at the final judgment but " Lord, 
I knew thee, that Thou art an hard man"? 



THE END. 



Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by John Wilson and Son. 



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